Speaker
Description
Sources of energetic electrons accelerated by ultra-intense lasers have diverse applications across various research fields. This presentation details recent numerical and experimental findings on electron acceleration using the ~0.7 kJ, ~0.7 ps LMJ-PETAL laser system. Due to the long pulse duration, the interaction of the PETAL beam with a gas jet (~cm in length) accelerates electrons in the self-modulated laser wakefield acceleration (SM-LWFA) regime. Experimentally, electron energies up to 300 MeV have been achieved, exhibiting an exponentially decreasing spectrum and a substantial divergence (~100 mrad), consistent with the SM-LWFA regime. Notably, the high laser energy results in a very high charge, in the microcoulomb range, which presents promising prospects for novel applications. Multidimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations, conducted using the Calder and Osiris codes, corroborate these findings. The simulations demonstrate laser self-focusing and self-modulation, along with electron acceleration in the wakefield. While direct laser acceleration (DLA) is also observed, it does not appear to be the dominant mechanism in this configuration.
Overall, these results, characterized by a broad spectrum but with a very high charge, offer promising avenues for new applications of LWFA in kJ and ps-class laser facilities, such as generation of intense secondary neutron sources or electron-positron pair jets.
| Paper status | No proceeding expected for this contribution. |
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