Speaker
Description
Laser-Plasma accelerators (LPAs) promise a compact alternative to modern RF-technology, and support orders of magnitude higher electric fields. GeV-energy LPA electron beams from cm-scale sources have been demonstrated. The intrinsically short scale of the accelerating structure features femtosecond-long beams with kA peak current, but at the same time makes precise control of the beam properties a challenge. In particular, the central energy jitter and energy spread, both on the percent-level, have so far prevented LPAs to drive real-world applications.
Here, we present active energy compression of a laser-plasma accelerated electron beam.
At the LUX experiment at DESY, a dipole chicane stretches the beams in time and thereby imprints an energy-time correlation (a chirp), which is subsequently removed inside a RF cavity. Our setup reduces the fluctuation in central energy as well as the energy spread of the beams by more than an order of magnitude down to the permille-level.
The achieved performance-level – so far only attributed to modern RF based accelerators – opens the door for a variety of applications, such as compact plasma-based injectors for synchrotron storage rings.
