Sub-femtosecond wakefield injector and accelerator based on an undulating plasma bubble controlled by a laser phase

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel plasma wakefield accelerator that uses undulating plasma bubbles driven by co-propagating laser pulses to achieve sub-femtosecond electron bunches with high charge and controlled injection.

Contribution

It presents a new method for controlling electron injection and acceleration in plasma bubbles using laser phase and undulatory motion, enabling sub-femtosecond electron bunches.

Findings

Undulatory plasma bubbles can be generated with co-propagating laser pulses.

Electron injection occurs when undulation amplitude exceeds a threshold.

The electron bunch spectrum is nearly independent of the injector pulse's CEP.

Abstract

We demonstrate that a long-propagating plasma bubble executing undulatory motion can be produced in the wake of two co-propagating laser pulses: a near-single-cycle injector and a multi-cycle driver. When the undulation amplitude exceeds the analytically derived threshold, highly-localized injections of plasma electrons into the bubble are followed by their long-distance acceleration. While the locations of the injection regions are controlled by the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the injector pulse, the mono-energetic spectrum of the accelerated sub-femtosecond high-charge electron bunches is shown to be nearly CEP-independent