Development of LPA based hard X-ray sources at ELI Beamlines

TL;DR

This paper reports on the development and commissioning of laser-plasma accelerator-based hard X-ray sources at ELI Beamlines, introducing novel optics, schemes for flux enhancement, and advanced probing techniques for plasma diagnostics.

Contribution

It presents new hard X-ray sources based on laser-plasma acceleration, innovative focusing optics, flux enhancement schemes, and a high-sensitivity optical probing method.

Findings

First experimental results of the ELI P3 X-ray source.

Successful implementation of novel focusing optics.

Proposed scheme for X-ray flux enhancement.

Abstract

We report the laser-plasma accelerator-based X-ray sources development at ELI beamlines. One of the main objectives of ELI Beamlines is to provide beams of ultrashort particle and complex X-ray sources to users from various research fields. Two hard X-ray betatron sources with high photon flux based on laser-plasma acceleration (LPA) are being commissioned. The first source is the Gammatron beamline located in Experimental Hall E2. It provides X-ray pulses of energies from 1-100 keV in betatron and up to a MeV in Compton scheme. A novel X-ray optics has been designed as a focusing optics of these hard X-ray sources for the user application. The second hard X-ray source based on LPA is being developed in the ELI plasma physics platform (P3) that will serve as an active diagnostics HED and Laboratory astrophysics, multi-beam experiments, and fundamental research. This source is now being commissioned, we will present the first experimental results. Besides, we have proposed a novel scheme for enhancing the X-ray flux based on betatron oscillations enhanced from nonlinear resonances due to interaction with a two-color laser field. In addition, we will introduce a novel optical probing technique with high sensitivity to characterize a low-density gas target for a laser-plasma accelerator. It has been achieved by employing multiple passes of the probe beam through the object and relay-imaging of the object between the individual passes.