Speaker
Dr
Jonathan Wood
(Imperial College London)
Description
A self-guided, self-injecting laser wakefield accelerator driven by a 120 TW laser pulse was implemented in a long focal length (f/40) geometry. Electrons were accelerated beyond 1.9 GeV in a 10 mm long plasma while maintaining a betatron source size below 0.5 micrometers. When the plasma length was extended beyond 10 mm a second electron bunch was injected with a high charge per unit bandwidth, which increased the number of betatron x-ray photons by a factor of five at moderate photon energies (16 keV critical energy). Simulations suggest this second injection resulted from a dynamic evolution of the bubble size. By further increasing the laser power to 240 TW the peak brightness of the betatron beam was increased above 1.0 x 10^24 photons/s/mm^2/mrad^2/0.1%BW at 18 keV, with the whole beam containing 3 x 10^10 photons above 1 keV. This has led to a significant advancement in the capabilities of the betatron source, demonstrated by a dramatic improvement in the signal to noise ratio of betatron imaging.
Primary author
Dr
Jonathan Wood
(Imperial College London)
Co-authors
Dr
Aakash Sahai
(Imperial College London)
Dr
CHRISTOS KAMPERIDIS
(ELI-ALPS, HU)
Dr
Charlotte Palmer
(Lancaster University/Cockcroft Institute)
Dr
Daniel Symes
(Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)
Mr
Dean Rusby
(STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)
Dr
Gianluca Sarri
(Queen's University Belfast)
Dr
Jason Cole
(Imperial College London)
Dr
Kristjan Poder
(DESY)
Dr
Nelson Lopes
(Imperial College London)
Olena Kononenko
(Deutsches-Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY))
Dr
Peta Foster
(STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)
Dr
Saleh Alatabi
(Imperial College London)
Dr
Stuart Mangles
(Imperial College London)
Mr
Warwick Jonathan
(Queens University Belfast)
Prof.
Zulfikar Najmudin
(Imperial College London)
