LWFA electron beams have evolved from their rather random performance of the early days to a well-controlled, tunable electron source able to serve real-world applications. The key ingredient for this evolution was the realization of various controlled injection schemes. Here we show that by combination of shock-front and colliding pulse injection it is possible to generate two independently...
The demonstration of a free-electron laser presents one of today’s main challenges in the field of plasma acceleration. Driving the FEL process with laser-plasma accelerated electron beams requires low transverse emittances and high spectral charge densities. Here we present our recent progress on the generation of high-quality electron beams at the LUX beamline. Few-percent relative energy...
Laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) using self- or ionisation-injection techniques have been demonstrated to produce GeV electron beams, but typically suffer from large energy spreads when operating in this regime. One promising alternative scheme is shock injection, where abrupt changes in the local density of a LWFA gas target can induce the injection of electrons into the wakefield. This...
