Abstract
In laser-wakefield acceleration, an ultra-intense laser pulse is focused into an underdense plasma to accelerate electrons to relativistic velocities. In most cases, the pulses consist of multiple optical cycles and the interaction is well described in the framework of the ponderomotive force where only the envelope of the laser has to be considered. But when using single-cycle pulses, the ponderomotive approximation breaks down, and the actual waveform of the laser has to be taken into account. In this paper, we use near-single-cycle laser pulses to drive a laser-wakefield accelerator. We observe variations of the electron beam pointing on the order of 10 mrad in the polarization direction, as well as 30% variations of the beam charge, locked to the value of the controlled laser carrier-envelope phase, in both nitrogen and helium plasma. Those findings are explained through particle-in-cell simulations indicating that low-emittance, ultrashort electron bunches are periodically injected off-axis by the transversally oscillating bubble associated with the slipping carrier-envelope phase.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under Contract no. ANR-20-CE92-0043-01. Numerical simulations were performed using HPC resources from GENCI-TGCC (Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif) (Grant no. 2020-A0090510062) with the IRENE supercomputer. This project has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program IFAST under Grant Agreement no. 101004730.
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Ultrafast Phenomena from attosecond to picosecond timescales: theory and experiments. Guest editors: Franck Lépine, Lionel Poisson.
Appendix 1: PIC simulation results for an initial CEP of \(\pi /2\)
Appendix 1: PIC simulation results for an initial CEP of \(\pi /2\)
Figure 11 shows a similar PIC simulation analysis as in Fig. 6 of the main text, but with an initial CEP shifted by \(\pi /2\). There are again clearly three main injection events, yielding three separate micro-bunches, but now electron are mainly injected from the top (blue) with a negative initial momentum and the total beam points downward at the end of the simulation.
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Rovige, L., Monzac, J., Huijts, J. et al. Carrier-envelope phase controlled dynamics of relativistic electron beams in a laser-wakefield accelerator. Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. 232, 2265–2276 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-022-00675-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-022-00675-7