Compton recoil effects in staging of laser wakefield accelerators

Abstract

Laser plasma accelerators capable of generating >10 GeV electron beams may require plasma mirrors to remove undepleted laser energy at the end of each accelerator stage. Near the plasma mirror surface, the electron bunch can interact with the reflected light, resulting in inverse Compton scattering. For realistic conditions, we show that a significant fraction of electrons emit one or more photons, increasing the energy spread of the electron bunch. We provide an analytical expression for calculating this effect, and use it to estimate the minimum drift space required before the plasma mirror to meet given energy spread specifications. Mitigation strategies, necessary to achieve sub-percent energy spread in multi-GeV laser wakefield electron sources, are proposed and explored.