Modelling of laser-plasma acceleration of relativistic electrons in the frame of ESCULAP project

TL;DR

This paper presents numerical simulations of laser-plasma acceleration of electrons in the ESCULAP project, demonstrating efficient acceleration from 10 MeV to 140 MeV with low energy spread using a new modeling code.

Contribution

Introduction of WakeTraj, a new numerical code, for optimizing laser-plasma acceleration parameters in the ESCULAP project.

Findings

Electrons accelerated up to 140 MeV

Energy spread maintained below 5%

Optimized laser-plasma configuration identified

Abstract

We present numerical simulations results on the injection and acceleration of a 10 MeV, 10 pC electrons beam in a plasma wave generated in a gas cell by a 2J, 45 fs laser beam. This modeling is related to the ESCULAP project in which the electrons accelerated by the PHIL photo-injector is injected in a gas cell irradiated by the laser beam of the LASERIX system. Extensive modeling of the experiment was performed in order to determine optimal parameters of the laser plasma configurations. This was done with the newly developed numerical code WakeTraj . We propose a configuration that benefits of a highly compressed electron bunch and for which the injected electron beam can be efficiently coupled to the plasma wave and accelerated up to 140 MeV, with an energy spread lower than 5%.