Speaker
Description
Laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs) offer an attractive alternative to conventional accelerators, enabling the acceleration of high-brightness electron beams to ultra-relativistic energies using compact, table-top setups. However, LPAs and their applications are plagued by intrinsic shot-to-shot instability largely attributed to fast fluctuations (>1 Hz) and long-term drifts (<1 Hz) in the driving laser system. Specifically, fluctuations in the final focus longitudinal position result in correlated instability in LPA electron beam qualities, particularly for targets with precision tailored longitudinal profiles. We present a scheme for active stabilization of the longitudinal focal position for a 100 TW laser system, which involves noninvasive wavefront monitoring of the unamplified kHz pulse train and correction implementation via an upstream telescopic lens on millisecond timescales. This approach has demonstrated marked improvements in long-term LPA operation and shot-to-shot stability in terms of generated charge quantity and electron beam spectral content.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award Number DE-SC0021680 and Prime Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
| Working group | WG5 : Beam sources, monitoring and control |
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