3,934 research outputs found
Demonstration of a beam loaded nanocoulomb-class laser wakefield accelerator.
Laser-plasma wakefield accelerators have seen tremendous progress, now capable of producing quasi-monoenergetic electron beams in the GeV energy range with few-femtoseconds bunch duration. Scaling these accelerators to the nanocoulomb range would yield hundreds of kiloamperes peak current and stimulate the next generation of radiation sources covering high-field THz, high-brightness X-ray and γ-ray sources, compact free-electron lasers and laboratory-size beam-driven plasma accelerators. However, accelerators generating such currents operate in the beam loading regime where the accelerating field is strongly modified by the self-fields of the injected bunch, potentially deteriorating key beam parameters. Here we demonstrate that, if appropriately controlled, the beam loading effect can be employed to improve the accelerator's performance. Self-truncated ionization injection enables loading of unprecedented charges of ∼0.5 nC within a mono-energetic peak. As the energy balance is reached, we show that the accelerator operates at the theoretically predicted optimal loading condition and the final energy spread is minimized.Higher beam quality and stability are desired in laser-plasma accelerators for their applications in compact light sources. Here the authors demonstrate in laser plasma wakefield electron acceleration that the beam loading effect can be employed to improve beam quality by controlling the beam charge
Restoring betatron phase coherence in a beam-loaded laser-wakefield accelerator
Matched beam loading in laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA), characterizing
the state of flattening of the acceleration electric field along the bunch,
leads to the minimization of energy spread at high bunch charges. Here, we
demonstrate by independently controlling injected charge and acceleration
gradients, using the self-truncated ionization injection scheme, that minimal
energy spread coincides with a reduction of the normalized beam divergence.
With the simultaneous confirmation of a constant beam radius at the plasma
exit, deduced from betatron radiation spectroscopy, we attribute this effect to
the reduction of chromatic betatron decoherence. Thus, beam loaded LWFA enables
highest longitudinal and transverse phase space densities
Constructing solutions to the Bj\"orling problem for isothermic surfaces by structure preserving discretization
In this article, we study an analog of the Bj\"orling problem for isothermic
surfaces (that are more general than minimal surfaces): given a real analytic
curve in , and two analytic non-vanishing orthogonal
vector fields and along , find an isothermic surface that is
tangent to and that has and as principal directions of
curvature. We prove that solutions to that problem can be obtained by
constructing a family of discrete isothermic surfaces (in the sense of Bobenko
and Pinkall) from data that is sampled along , and passing to the limit
of vanishing mesh size. The proof relies on a rephrasing of the
Gauss-Codazzi-system as analytic Cauchy problem and an in-depth-analysis of its
discretization which is induced from the geometry of discrete isothermic
surfaces. The discrete-to-continuous limit is carried out for the Christoffel
and the Darboux transformations as well.Comment: 29 pages, some figure
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