Energy Compression and Stabilization of Laser-Plasma Accelerators

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method combining bunch decompression and active plasma dechirping to significantly improve the energy spread and stability of laser-plasma accelerator beams, making them more competitive with conventional accelerators.

Contribution

It introduces a novel post-acceleration phase-space manipulation technique to reduce energy spread and jitter in laser-plasma accelerators.

Findings

Reduced energy spread from ~1-2% to <0.1%.

Lowered energy jitter, enhancing beam stability.

Demonstrated via realistic simulations.

Abstract

Laser-plasma accelerators outperform current radiofrequency technology in acceleration strength by orders of magnitude. Yet, enabling them to deliver competitive beam quality for demanding applications, particularly in terms of energy spread and stability, remains a major challenge. In this Letter, we propose to combine bunch decompression and active plasma dechirping for drastically improving the energy profile and stability of beams from laser-plasma accelerators. Realistic start-to-end simulations demonstrate the potential of these post-acceleration phase-space manipulations for simultaneously reducing an initial energy spread and energy jitter of $\sim1$-$2\%$ to ${\lesssim} 0.1 \%$, closing the beam-quality gap to conventional acceleration schemes.