Laser wakefield simulations towards development of compact particle accelerators

Review of Laser Wakefield Accelerators

This review article highlights the recent evolution of research on laser wakefield accelerators, which has, in record time, led to the production of high quality electron beams beyond the GeV level, using compact laser systems. As shown here, the most significant breakthroughs allow to produce stable, high peak current and high quality electron beams, with a fine control of the charge, of the r...

Longitudinal Laser Shaping in Laser Wakefield Accelerators

Scaling Laws for Laser Wakefield Accelerators

Scaling laws are derived as a function of laser wavelength for various quantities of interest for a single stage of a channel-guided laser wakefield accelerator. Comparisons are made for drive laser pulses of equal energies. Scalings that favor short or long wavelengths depend on the quantity that is to be optimized. For example, holding the number of electrons per bunch constant favors shorter...

Unphysical kinetic effects in particle-in-cell modeling of laser wakefield accelerators.

Unphysical heating and macroparticle trapping that arise in the numerical modeling of laser wakefield accelerators using particle-in-cell codes are investigated. A dark current free laser wakefield accelerator stage, in which no trapping of background plasma electrons into the plasma wave should occur, and a highly nonlinear cavitated wake with self-trapping, are modeled. Numerical errors can l...

3D Simulations of Pre-Ionized and Two-Stage Ionization Injected Laser Wakefield Accelerators

In plasma based accelerators (LWFA and PWFA), the methods of injecting high quality electron bunches into the accelerating wakefield is of utmost importance for various applications. To fully understand the numerical effect of simulating the trapping process, numerous numerical convergence tests were performed to ensure the correctness of preionized simulations which confirm the physical pictur...