Speaker
Mr
Christopher Arran
(University of Oxford)
Description
Frequency Domain Holography (FDH) has proved an effective way of measuring plasma wakefields driven by short laser pulses. With this technique, chirped probe and reference pulses are positioned temporally before and after a driving laser pulse, and co-propagate with it through the plasma. Information about the plasma wave is encoded in the transmitted probe pulse, and may be retrieved by spectral interferometry.
Reconstruction of the plasma wakefield requires that both the temporal and spectral amplitude and phase of the transmitted probe pulse are determined, which requires additional information about the incident probe and reference pulses. Temporally-encoded Spectral Shifting (TESS) allows the amplitude and frequency of the wakefield to be determined from a single Fourier transform of the interferogram.
We present results from a experiments with the Astra Laser at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in which TESS was used to characterize the plasma wakefield. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TESS both for fast on-shot measurement as well as for analysis of large data sets. We compare FDH and TESS analyses and show that the latter could measure the plasma frequency and the relative wake amplitude with sub-percent statistical error.
Primary author
Mr
Christopher Arran
(University of Oxford)
Co-authors
Mr
Christopher Thornton
(STFC)
Mr
Gavin Cheung
(University of Oxford)
Mr
James Cowley
(University of Oxford)
Dr
Laura Corner
(JAI, Oxford University)
Dr
Nicholas Matlis
(DESY)
Mr
Robert Shalloo
(JAI, University of Oxford)
Prof.
Roman Walczak
(University of Oxford)
Prof.
Simon Hooker
(University of Oxford)