Author: Abercrombie, D.R.
Paper Title Page
TUPEA089 Modeling and Experimental Update on Quasi-phase Matched Direct Laser Electron Acceleration In Density-modulated Plasma Waveguides 1325
 
  • M.W. Lin, D.R. Abercrombie, I. Jovanovic, A. Rakhman
    Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
  
  Funding: This work has been supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency through Contract HDTRA1-11-1-0009.
Di­rect laser ac­cel­er­a­tion (DLA) of elec­trons using the axial elec­tric field of a ra­di­ally po­lar­ized, guided in­tense laser pulse has the po­ten­tial to lead to com­pact laser-dri­ven ac­cel­er­a­tors* for se­cu­rity and med­ical ap­pli­ca­tions. A den­sity-mod­u­lated plasma wave­guide could be ap­plied to ex­tend the laser beam prop­a­ga­tion dis­tance and to achieve quasi-phase match­ing (QPM) be­tween laser and elec­tron pulses for ef­fi­cient DLA**. We con­duct nu­mer­i­cal sim­u­la­tions to de­sign the ap­pro­pri­ate plasma struc­ture of the wave­guides and in­ves­ti­gate the prop­er­ties of ac­cel­er­ated elec­tron beams. An all-op­ti­cal method, based on the ig­niter-heater scheme for plasma wave­guide fab­ri­ca­tion, is ex­per­i­men­tally im­ple­mented to ma­chine the den­sity-mod­u­lated plasma wave­guides with low-Z gas tar­gets. A novel an­gle-mul­ti­plexed di­ag­nos­tic tech­nique has been de­vel­oped to ex­tract the po­lar­iza­tion state and tem­po­ral char­ac­ter­is­tics of a ra­di­ally po­lar­ized fem­tosec­ond laser pulse using spa­tial-spec­tral in­ter­fer­om­e­try***. The goal of our ex­per­i­ments is to char­ac­ter­ize the prop­a­ga­tion of fem­tosec­ond ra­di­ally po­lar­ized pulses in plasma wave­guides.
* P. Serafim, et al., IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. 28, 1155 (2000).
** M. -W. Lin and I. Jovanovic, Phys. Plasmas 19, 113104 (2012).
***P. Bowlan, et al., Opt. Exp. 14, 11892 (2006)