23–28 Aug 2026
America/Los_Angeles timezone

Pair beams unlock beyond‑terawatt attosecond free‑electron laser pulses

WEP28
26 Aug 2026, 17:00
1h
Poster Presentation Session 9: Novel Accelerator and FEL Concepts Wednesday Poster Session

Speaker

Cagri Erciyes (Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)

Description

Free-electron lasers (FELs) deliver the brightest coherent X-ray pulses for atomic-resolution ultrafast science, yet scaling to extreme peak powers and attosecond durations faces a fundamental barrier: in the ultrahigh-current regime, longitudinal space-charge fields impose slice-dependent energy detuning that suppresses gain and confines efficient lasing to a small bunch fraction. We demonstrate that a quasi-neutral electron-positron pair beam eliminates this self-field entirely, enabling full-bunch coherent amplification without external compensation. Three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations of a single-pass untapered undulator confirm the mechanism in two regimes: in the soft X-ray range, the pair beam reaches ~1.85 TW at ~345 as with enhanced odd harmonics and improved spatial coherence, while the electron-only beam fails to saturate; in a high-harmonic pair-cascade configuration, ~10 TW isolated spikes of ~3.5 as emerge with coherent amplification to ~177 keV. These results establish a new operating regime for ultrahigh-power attosecond sources and a direct route to coherent gamma-ray emission beyond 100 keV, presently inaccessible to magnetic-undulator FELs.

Footnotes

(*) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.15407

I have read and accept the Privacy Policy Statement Yes

Author

Cagri Erciyes (Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)

Co-authors

Prof. Christoph Helmut Keitel (Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics) Dr Matteo Tamburini (Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.