Focus on Laser- and Beam-Driven Plasma Accelerators

Review of Beam Driven Plasma Wakefield Accelerators

The current status of the beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerators is reviewed.

Laser-driven plasma-wave electron accelerators

The development of laser- and beam-driven plasma accelerators as an experimental field

Since its inception in the early 1980s, the field of plasma-based particle accelerators has made remarkable advances. Robust plasma accelerating structures can now be excited over centimeter scales using short laser pulses and over meter scales using ultrarelativistic particle beams. Accelerating fields in excess of tens of GV/m can be sustained over these lengths. Laser-driven plasma accelerat...

Beam Dynamics Studies into Grating-based Dielectric Laser-driven Accelerators*

Dielectric laser-driven accelerators (DLAs) based on gratings confine an electromagnetic field induced by a drive laser into a narrow vacuum channel where electrons travel and are accelerated. This can provide an alternative acceleration scheme compared to conventional RF cavity accelerators. Due to the achievable high accelerating gradient of up to several GV/m this could pave the way for futu...

Formation of optical bullets in laser-driven plasma bubble accelerators.

Electron density bubbles--wake structures generated in plasma of density n(e) approximately 10(19) cm(-3) by the light pressure of intense ultrashort laser pulses--are shown to reshape weak copropagating probe pulses into optical "bullets." The bullets are reconstructed using frequency-domain interferometric techniques in order to visualize bubble formation. Bullets are confined in three dimens...