Laser Wakefield Acceleration in a Plasma Channel

Abstract

It is shown by numerical simulations that, if a laser pulse from the eXawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies (Sarov) is used as a driver for a laser wakefield accelerator, an electron bunch with a charge of 50 pC can be accelerated to energy of 100 GeV with an energy spread of less than 1%. To this end, it is necessary to form a plasma channel 70 m long with a characteristic radius of 200 μm and a plasma density of 3 × 10¹⁵ cm^–3 on the axis. In a denser plasma, the acceleration rate is higher, but the acceleration length and the resulting energy are smaller. The accelerator parameters can be numerically optimized using a quasistatic model describing the laser pulse in terms of its envelope, which reduces the computation time by several orders of magnitude as compared to complete models.