We investigate a simple hydrodynamic plasma expansion model
which contains the coupled continuity, Euler and Poisson equations
with the reduction technique applying the self-similar and the traveling wave trial functions and present analytic results.
The Advanced Wakefield Experiment, AWAKE, at CERN is an accelerator R&D experiment, which moved from a proof-of-concept experiment to a facility that develops the proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration technology to be ready for proposing first particle physics applications in the 2030’s. The AWAKE program aims to accelerate electrons to energies of 10 to 100 GeV in a single plasma...
X-ray free-electron lasers currently rely on kilometre-scale linear accelerators to produce very high quality electron beams with GeV energies. Plasma-based accelerators are a highly compact alternative with a drastically higher accelerating gradient and smaller footprint. Here, we show in simulation how beams from a plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA) could drive a robust and tunable compact...
The measurement of electron energy spectra can be understood as distinguishing high-energy and low-energy electrons by electromagnetic deflection at varying angles. When the deflection distance is constrained, the deflection force determines the upper energy limit of the measurement. Given that static magnetic fields in the macroscopic world are limited to ~10 T, magnets ~1 m in length are...
This poster presents the development of an advanced plasma target designed for laser-plasma injectors and accelerators. It specifically focuses on gas cell targets with spatial confinement of a nitrogen/helium mixture. This design ensures controlled localized ionization injection, leading to high-quality electron beam production.
We compare fluid dynamics simulations with experimental...
Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) of electrons is predominantly achieved using gas targets. In recent years, the development of high-repetition-rate, high-intensity lasers has driven research into employing high-density gas targets to generate very high-energy electrons (VHEE) beams, which hold potential for medical applications. Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) laser beams differ from Gaussian beams...
Laser-driven ion sources are emerging as a compact and complementary alternative to conventional accelerators due to their unique features, including ultra-short bunch duration, ultrahigh dose rate, and low emittance. Over the past decade, research efforts have focused on optimizing key beam parameters (energy, flux, divergence, and shot-to-shot stability) to meet application demands.
The...
Plasma-wakefield acceleration (PWFA) has gained global attention for the achievable ultra-high accelerating gradients, which will drastically reduce the price, footprint, and carbon load of accelerators to be used for medical applications, free electron lasers (FEL), and future high-energy physics experiments. The Compact Linear Accelerator for Research and Applications (CLARA) at the...
The muon beams decay quickly at low energy. Therefore, it is important to rapidly accelerate the muon beams to higher energy to ensure sufficient lifetime for beam manipulations or further acceleration. Plasma acceleration offers higher acceleration gradients compared to conventional RF cavities. It is the most promising acceleration method for muon research projects at the HIAF facility. The...
This paper pioneers the first study on heavy-ion-driven plasma wakefield acceleration, highlighting potential of heavy ions (higher beam charge density, heavier particle mass and higher kinetic energy) to plasma-based acceleration techniques. Our investigation aims to identify an optimal regime for achieving high-amplitude wakefields excited by heavy ion beams. Among various drivers in HIAF,...
Energetic electron sources generated by ultra-intense lasers can serve for various applications in many research fields. In this presentation, we will report on recent numerical and experimental results on electron acceleration with the ~ 0.3 kJ, 0.7 ps, 5×10^18 W/cm^2 LMJ-PETAL laser system. Due to the long pulse duration, the interaction of the PETAL beam with a gas jet accelerates electrons...
Plasma-based accelerators provide a compact and efficient means of generating ultra-relativistic particles [1], making them strong candidates for next-generation light sources. These X-ray sources are inherently ultrafast, highly-collimated, and energetic, with applications in many fields.
One of the most well-established mechanisms for X-ray generation in plasma accelerators is nonlinear...
A state-of-the-art high-energy short-pulse laser system was commissioned last year at Lund Laser Centre. This dual-output Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification (OPCPA) system delivers sub-10 fs pulses at 10 Hz and 100 Hz repetition rates, generating independent output channels of up to 30 TW and 6 TW, respectively. Operating at a central wavelength of 850 nm with a broad bandwidth of...
Very High Energy Electrons (VHEE) are emerging as a cancer treatment commodity. Compared to protons, VHEE is less sensitive to inhomogeneities within the human body. This means they are less damaging to healthy tissue when treating dynamic organs such as the lungs, liver, and kidneys. VHEE have a range of penetration depth depending upon the energy, often ranging from 50 MeV to 250 MeV. Such...
In this study, the acceleration of proton beams from gas targets, formed by converging shock nozzles and utilising a 1 Hz laser with limited pulse energy, has been demonstrated.
Energetic ion beams are routinely generated in laser-driven ion acceleration experiments in PW-class laser-foil experiments but are limited by slow repetition rate of these laser systems. New opportunities of...
Swift macro-tools can be useful when real-time analysis is key, such as fast image capturing and processing, for instance, when studying multi-parametric phenomena such as LWFA.
During tight beamtime schedules, such an approach is central to quickly optimizing physical outputs via fast diagnostics. In LWFA investigation, where high repetition rate shots can be carried out, fast processing can...
The ability of laser plasma accelerators (LPA) to produce quasimonoenergetic electron beams with energies ranging from tens of MeV to tens of GeV in just a few millimeters to centimeters brought LPA to the attention of many scientific and industry fields. Arguably the most important of them is medicine, in a newly developed, so-called FLASH radiotherapy. In this regard, generating high-quality...
The α-particle sources present many applications and may be produced through nuclear reactions thanks to laser-driven protons [V. S. Belyaev, A. P. Matafonov, V. I. Vinogradov, V. P. Krainov, V. S. Lisitsa, A. S. Roussetski, G. N. Ignatyev, and V. P. Andrianov, Phys. Rev. E 72, 026406 (2005)]. In this numerical study, the effect of the target geometry, planar or spherical, is investigated and...
The generation of low emittance electron beams from laser-driven wakefields is crucial for the development of compact x-ray sources. Here, we show new results for the injection and acceleration of quasimonoenergetic electron beams in low amplitude wakefields experimentally and using simulations. This is achieved by using two laser pulses decoupling the wakefield generation from the electron...
Laser Wakefield acceleration (LWFA) has been demonstrated as a mechanism to accelerate electrons to very high energies over a few millimeters. A high-intensity laser ionizes the atoms in a gas mixture, and excites plasma waves with accelerating gradients reaching up to 100 GV/m – far exceeding those in conventional accelerators. Enhancing the electron beam charge and energy while minimizing...
A plasma mirror reflected pulse was evaluated for staging applications. The Gemini north beam was focused just after a Kapton tape. On-tape intensities of $10^{19}-10^{21} Wm^{−2}$ generated a plasma mirror. The reflected pulse was used to drive a injection and acceleration in a gas cell.
The plasma mirror was operated with a reflectivity exceeding 70%, this fell for on-tape intensities...
In laser-ion acceleration experiments, the rising flank of a high power laser pulse can cause target pre-ionization and subsequent pre-expansion long before the arrival of the main laser peak. Exact knowledge of this target pre-expansion is required in order to understand laser-plasma acceleration mechanisms with the help of numerical simulations. For dielectric targets, the start of target...
Ultrashort high-peak current electron beams generated from laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) are capable to drive high accelerating gradient plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFAs) operating in high plasma density regime. Implementation of advanced cold-injection schemes in this hybrid platform promises the generation of high brightness electron beams with unprecedented low emittance and...
AWAKE is a plasma wakefield acceleration experiment where the wakefields are driven by a highly energetic, long proton bunch that undergoes the self-modulation instability. The objectives of Run 2c, due to start in 2029, are to demonstrate emittance preservation of the accelerated electron bunch.
In contrast with the 10-meter-long plasma setup used thus far, in Run 2c the witness electron...
Electron beams produced via Laser Wakefield Acceleration are notorious for their non-negligible pointing instability. This makes the retrieval of the energy spectrum via magnetic spectrometers particularly prone to energy miscalculations. As such, various spectrometer configurations have already been suggested to correct spectra for the pointing angle. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an...
High-Harmonic Generation (HHG) from laser-solid interactions is a process whereby harmonics of the incident driving pulse are generated; a phenomenon which is paving the way to the generation of attosecond pulses and the emission of coherent extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and soft X-ray radiation. Chirped harmonics can be produced by varying the chirp of the driving beam as shown by simulations...
The overarching goal of EuPRAXIA is to pioneer the development of next-generation compact particle accelerators using advanced plasma-based technology. Among the most promising methods for achieving this vision is laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA), which enables the generation of high-energy electron beams within a compact setup.
This work explores the effect of ultrashort laser pulses...
X-rays radiation produced by electrons oscillating in a plasma in the Laser WakeField Acceleration (LWFA) process is called betatron radiation.
When an ultra-short, high-intensity laser pulse interacts with a supersonic gas jet, it simultaneously ionizes the gas, creating a plasma, and injects and accelerates electrons into the plasma wave, leading to the emission of this radiation.
As...
Particle-in-cell (PIC) codes have been a cornerstone of plasma-based accelerator development. However, these work at the most fundamental, microscopic level, making few physics approximations, which makes them some of the most computationally expensive models in plasma physics, requiring efficient use of even the most modern HPC systems.
In this paper, we present a generalized...
The first FEL light from LWFA beams has recently been demonstrated. However, achieving shorter wavelengths requires stable and optimized beams, which remains a challenge due to the nonlinear nature of cavity formation and injection, and because many critical parameters are not directly accessible in experiments, making it difficult to fully characterize the 6D phase space.
We present a...
This study investigates the propagation and reflection of electromagnetic waves in a conducting cylindrical cavity with a small aperture, analyzing the effects of boundary conditions on wave transmission and diffraction. Using a Green’s function approach, we derive exact solutions for the electromagnetic potentials in the Lorentz gauge, incorporating the influence of conducting boundaries and...
A free electron laser (FEL) is a revolutionary light source capable of producing femtosecond-duration hard X-rays. These properties make FELs ideal for probing rapidly evolving phenomena, such as shock waves in metals, and for imaging dense materials, like in bone tomography. However, modeling FELs is challenging due to their extremely short radiation wavelengths and the large physical size of...
The commissioning of multi-Petawatt laser systems is gathering pace around the world, promising unparalleled access to ultra-high electromagnetic fields for fundamental Physics studies. Here, we present the first real-time three-dimensional simulation results of two quantum vacuum effects using a semi-classical numerical solver for the Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian. The simulation model is...
Plasma-based accelerators achieve accelerating fields of 10-100 GV/m. While plasma wakefields naturally accelerate electrons due to their near-light-speed motion [1,2], heavier particles like muons [3] and pions, with lifetimes from microseconds to nanoseconds, struggle to be trapped due to velocity mismatch with the wake.
We use spatio-temporal spectral shaping [4,5,6] to control the group...
Plasma acceleration is a groundbreaking technology with applications in accelerator and light source facilities, medical and nuclear physics, and beyond. However, their development and optimization rely on computationally intensive Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations, requiring specialized expertise and multiple simulation tools, significantly limiting broader adoption.
Geant4 [1] is a...
The study of laser-plasma interactions deeply relies on Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations due to the complexity and the high non-linearity of the physics involved. In this regard, PIC simulations are a powerful instrument in modeling and predicting the outcomes of a Laser Plasma Accelerator experiment. However, the results of this kind of simulations can be profoundly different from the...
Laser-Plasma Accelerators (LPAs) are emerging as versatile sources for generating ultra-high dose rate beams for radiotherapy research. With ultrashort pulse durations from femtoseconds to nanoseconds, they enable instantaneous dose rates exceeding 10⁹ Gy/s. Their acceleration gradients, surpassing 100 GV/m, allow for the generation of Very High Energy Electron (VHEE) beams (>50 MeV) in a...
Following the successful experimental demonstration of proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration in AWAKE Run 1 (2016-2018), the subsequent Run 2 (2022-) experiment aims to achieve high-quality electron beam acceleration to several-GeV energies, applicable for high-energy physics experiments. Non-invasive betatron diagnostics could play a crucial role in determining key witness beam...
Here we present progress on the high-intensity, short-pulse, multibeam mid-infrared (MIR) OPCPA laser system named Chimera, based at Imperial College London. With a primary beam in the MIR spectral range (centred at 3.7 µm), the system lends itself to an abundance of potential high-field applications and experiments. Largely as a result of the lack of available gain media with the bandwidth to...
Axion, a theoretically well-motivated particle, has been searched extensively worldwide via its hypothetical interaction with ordinary matter and fields. Recently, a new axion detection approach has been considered utilizing the ultra-intense electromagnetic (EM) fields produced by laser-plasma interactions. However, a detailed simulation tool is missing in current studies to understand the...
Achieving high-quality electron beam is crucial for the next generation Free Electron Laser (FEL) operating in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) range of the radiation spectrum. In order to transport the laser-plasma-accelerator-based electron bunch without significant degradation in beam quality, the capture block of the electron beamline can be designed using either a set of quadrupole magnets...
Bright, coherent extreme ultraviolet (XUV) light has many important applications across the sciences. Frequency upshifting of an optical laser pulse in the co-moving refractive index gradient of a relativistic phase-velocity plasma wave is one method for producing short wavelengths at high intensity. In particular, beam-driven plasma wakefields can generate arbitrarily high frequency-upshifts...
In recent years, laser-driven ion accelerators have gained significant interest as an alternative to conventional accelerators. A promising application is the production of radionuclides for medical theragnostics, such as ¹¹C for PET imaging. Currently, these radionuclides are produced in cyclotrons, limiting availability to isotopes with longer lifetime. In this context, compact laser-driven...
Recent advancements in high-intensity lasers have made all-optical Compton scattering a promising method for generating ultrashort, brilliant $\gamma$-rays in compact systems. However, existing Compton $\gamma$-ray sources are limited by low conversion efficiency and spectral intensity. In this study, we explore overdense electron acceleration and $\gamma$-ray emission through 2D and 3D...
Recent progress in laser technology opens new possibilities in high-field science, notably to investigate the largely unexplored strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED) regime where electron-positron pairs can be created directly from light-light or even light-vacuum interactions. Here we propose a new strategy where a single laser pulse is first used to accelerate electrons to high...
We present a synthetic optical imaging plugin for PIConGPU, that enables self-consistent imaging of plasma structures in laser-plasma accelerators. By integrating electromagnetic fields from the PIC simulation and propagating them via Fourier methods onto a virtual screen, we generate synthetic images that resemble experimental measurements. This approach allows direct comparison with...
Liquid-plasma interactions are vital to advancing applications such as plasma water treatment, nanoparticle production, and biomedicine. However, many open questions remain in understanding breakdown mechanisms in liquids, particularly the formation and evolution of plasma structures. Here, we optimized a laser betatron source for single-shot x-ray imaging of nanosecond pulsed discharges in...
We present a new acceleration scheme capable of accelerating electrons and ions in an underdense plasma. Transversely Pumped Acceleration (TPA) uses multiple arrays of counter-propagating laser beamlets that focus onto a central acceleration axis. Tuning the injection timing and the spacing between the adjacent beamlets allows for precise control over the position and velocity of the...
The Xopt/Badger ecosystem offers a versatile suite of tools designed to address the growing needs of advanced optimization and online control in scientific applications. The goal of these tools is to standardize the implementation and use of advanced optimization algorithms at arbitrary scientific facilities for the benefit of the wider accelerator community. In this work, we provide a summary...
Laser Wakefield Acceleration is a very promising technology opening new opportunities in modern electron accelerators worldwide. However, this highly nonlinear process requires highly stable laser drivers in order to reach the expected performances to be used in synchrotrons or Free-Electron Lasers. Among the different parameters one has to pay attention to, the temporal and spectral...
The MULTISCAN3D project aims to provide a technical solution to create 3D tomography systems capable of detecting threats invisible with current 2D technology. Laser-plasma acceleration appears to be a promising method to achieve this goal. Indeed, the laser allows generating multiple X-ray sources at low cost in order to perform 3D cargo scanning. Furthermore, laser-plasma acceleration can...
