GeV-scale accelerators driven by plasma-modulated pulses from kilohertz lasers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for driving GeV-scale plasma accelerators using long laser pulses modulated by plasma waves, enabling high-repetition-rate acceleration with efficient, high-energy laser systems.

Contribution

It presents a new plasma modulation technique for long laser pulses, validated by simulations, to efficiently accelerate electrons to GeV energies.

Findings

Demonstrated electron acceleration to 0.65 GeV in simulations.

Showed modulation process aligns with analytic models.

Proposed high-repetition-rate laser-driven plasma acceleration.

Abstract

We describe a new approach for driving GeV-scale plasma accelerators with long laser pulses. We show that the temporal phase of a long, high-energy driving laser pulse can be modulated periodically by co-propagating it with low-amplitude plasma wave driven by a short, low-energy seed pulse. Compression of the modulated driver by a dispersive optic generates a train of short pulses suitable for resonantly driving a plasma accelerator. Modulation of the driver occures via well-controlled linear process, as confirmed by good agreement between particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations and an analytic model. PIC simulations demonstrate that a 1.7 J, 1 ps driver and a 140 mJ, 40 fs seed pulse can accelerate electrons to energies of 0.65 GeV in a plasma channel with an axial density of 2.5 x 10$^{17}$ cm$^{-3}$. This work opens a route to high-repetition-rate, GeV-scale plasma accelerators driven by thin-disk lasers, which can provide joule-scale, picosecond-duration laser pulses at multi-kilohertz repetition rates and high wall-plug efficiencies.