Coupling of Laser-Generated Electrons with Conventional Accelerator Devices

TL;DR

This paper explores the integration of laser-generated electron beams with conventional accelerator components, comparing their parameters and discussing potential applications in Free Electron Lasers, highlighting current limitations and future prospects.

Contribution

It demonstrates how conventional accelerator parameters need adjustment for laser-plasma beams and compares different magnetic lattices for capturing GeV electrons from laser sources.

Findings

Laser-plasma electron beams differ from conventional ones in key parameters.

Certain magnetic lattice configurations can effectively capture laser-generated electrons.

Application in FELs requires high beam quality, posing challenges for laser-plasma sources.

Abstract

Laser-based electron acceleration is attracting strong interest from the conventional accelerator community due to its outstanding characteristics in terms of high initial energy, low emittance and high beam current. Unfortunately, such beams are currently not comparable to those of conventional accelerators, limiting their use for the manifold applications that a traditional accelerator can have. Besides working on the plasma source itself, a promising approach to shape the laser-generated beams is coupling them with conventional accelerator elements in order to benefit from both, a versatile electron source and a controllable beam. In this paper we show that some parameters commonly used by the particle accelerator community must be reconsidered when dealing with laser-plasma beams. Starting from the parameters of laser-generated electrons which can be obtained nowadays by conventional multi hundred TW laser systems, we compare different conventional magnetic lattices able to capture and transport those GeV electrons. From this comparison we highlight some important limit of the state-of-the-art plasma generated electrons with respect to conventional accelerator ones. Eventually we discuss an application of such beams in undulators for Free Electron Lasers (FELs), which is one of the most demanding applications in terms of beam quality.