Alternating Phase Focusing for Dielectric Laser Acceleration

TL;DR

This paper introduces an innovative scheme for stable beam confinement in dielectric laser accelerators, enabling microchip-scale fabrication and advancing towards compact, low-cost relativistic electron sources.

Contribution

It presents a novel confinement scheme combining alternating phase focusing with conventional quadrupoles for dielectric laser acceleration.

Findings

Achieved stable longitudinal and transverse beam confinement within a 420 nm aperture.

Demonstrated the potential for microchip fabrication of accelerator components.

Enabled optimized injection into transport, bunching, and accelerating structures.

Abstract

The concept of Dielectric Laser Acceleration (DLA) provides highest gradients among non-plasma particle accelerators. However, stable beam transport and staging have not been shown experimentally yet. We present a scheme that confines the beam longitudinally and in one transverse direction. Confinement in the other direction is obtained by a single conventional quadrupole magnet. Within the small aperture of 420 nm we find the matched distributions, which allow an optimized injection into pure transport, bunching, and accelerating structures. The combination of these resembles the photonics analogue of the Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ), but since our setup is entirely twodimensional, it can be manufactured on a microchip by lithographic techniques. This is a crucial step towards relativistic electrons in the MeV range from low-cost, handheld devices.