Abstract
We demonstrate experimentally the resonant excitation of plasma waves by trains of laser pulses. We also take an important first step to achieving an energy recovery plasma accelerator by showing that a plasma wave can be damped by an out-of-resonance trailing laser pulse. The measured laser wakefields are found to be in excellent agreement with analytical and numerical models of wakefield excitation in the linear regime. Our results indicate a promising direction for achieving highly controlled, GeV-scale laser-plasma accelerators operating at multikilohertz repetition rates.
- Received 15 March 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.044802
© 2017 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Synopsis
Particle Acceleration with Multiple Laser Pulses
Published 27 July 2017
Trains of laser pulses can be used to accelerate high-repetition-rate electron bunches to high energies.
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