Speaker
Description
Achieving high-quality electron beams from laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs) is critical for advancing applications such as Free-Electron Lasers and compact accelerators. We report on the observation of electron beams with low transverse momentum spread. This is achieved by using a gas cell to tailor the plasma density profile including an plateau, where acceleration occurs. This is followed by an exponential decay and then by a 10-mm long, low-density plasma tail. The post acceleration plasma acts as a combined plasma lens and dechirper, actively shaping the electron beam in three dimensions. The measured beams exhibit exceptional properties: 40 pC charge (FWHM) at 190 MeV, a low 1.9% energy spread, and a rms divergence of 0.54 mrad. Supported by numerical simulations using both Particle-in-Cell (PIC) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes, our results reveal that a self-driven wakefield within the low-density plasma tail effectively rotates the beam's phase space, leading to a significant increase in intensity. This suggests interesting possibilities to manipulate electron beams phase space in an integrated plasma device.
