Electron bunch injection at an angle into a laser wakefield

TL;DR

This paper proposes and simulates an angled injection method for electron bunches into laser wakefield accelerators, reducing energy spread and improving charge trapping compared to traditional on-axis injection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel angled injection technique that mitigates scattering effects and relaxes bunch size constraints in laser wakefield acceleration.

Findings

Achieves electron bunches with less than 2% energy spread.

Reduces ponderomotive scattering and vacuum-plasma transition effects.

Potential to trap more charge with less stringent bunch size requirements.

Abstract

External injection of electron bunches longer than the plasma wavelength in a laser wakefield accelerator can lead to the generation of femtosecond ultrarelativistic bunches with a couple of percent energy spread. Extensive study has been done on external electron bunch (e.g. one generated by a photo-cathode rf linac) injection in a laser wakefield for different configurations. In this paper we investigate a new way of external injection where the electron bunch is injected at a small angle into the wakefield. This way one can avoid the ponderomotive scattering as well as the vacuum-plasma transition region, which tend to destroy the injected bunch. In our simulations, the effect of the laser pulse dynamics is also taken into account. It is shown that injection at an angle can provide compressed and accelerated electron bunches with less than 2% energy spread. Another advantage of this scheme is that it has less stringent requirements in terms of the size of the injected bunch and there is the potential to trap more charge.