IPAC'24 - 15th International Particle Accelerator Conference

Optimization of laser coupling into optically field ionized plasma channels for laser-plasma acceleration

MOPR52

20 May 2024, 16:00

2h

Rock 'n Roll (MCC Exhibit Hall A)

Poster Presentation MC3.A22 Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Monday Poster Session

Speaker

Josh Stackhouse (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Description

Laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs) can have high acceleration gradients on the order of 100 GeV/m. The high acceleration gradients of LPAs offer the possibility of powering future colliders at the TeV range and reducing the size of particle accelerators at present energy levels. LPAs need tightly focused, high intensity laser pulses and require guiding structures to maintain the laser focus over the optimum acceleration length. It is necessary to match the parameters of the guiding structure and the laser pulse to couple the maximum laser energy into the guiding structure. Optically field ionized (OFI) plasma channels are a guiding structure capable of matching the parameters of the petawatt (PW) laser facility at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center [1, 2]. We will present results on the optimization of laser coupling into OFI plasma channels on BELLA PW. We will also discuss how optimization of laser coupling relates to upcoming staging experiments on BELLA PW.

Footnotes

[1] A. Picksley et al., Phys. Rev. E 102, 053201 (2020)
[2] L. Feder et al, Phys. Rev. Research 2, 043173 (2020)

Funding Agency

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics under Contract No. DE-AC02–05CH11231, and by DARPA.