Gev-Scale Accelerators Driven by Plasma-Modulated Pulses from Kilohertz Lasers.

Area of Science:

• Plasma Physics
• Laser-driven Acceleration

Background:

• Plasma accelerators offer a pathway to compact, high-energy particle beams.
• Conventional methods often require extremely high laser power or short pulses, limiting repetition rates.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel technique for driving GeV-scale plasma accelerators using long laser pulses.
• To enable high-repetition-rate operation of plasma accelerators.

Main Methods:

• Modulating the temporal phase of a long, high-energy laser driver by copropagating with a seeded plasma wave.
• Compressing the modulated driver using a dispersive optic to generate a pulse train.
• Utilizing particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations and an analytic model to verify modulation processes.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated periodic phase modulation of a long laser driver via interaction with a seeded plasma wave.
• Generated a train of short pulses suitable for resonant plasma acceleration.
• PIC simulations showed acceleration of electrons to 0.65 GeV using a 1.7 J, 1 ps driver and a 140 mJ, 40 fs seed pulse.

Conclusions:

• The developed method allows for controlled, linear modulation of long laser pulses.
• This approach paves the way for high-repetition-rate, GeV-scale plasma accelerators driven by efficient thin-disk lasers.