Laser Wakefield Acceleration by using a Laser Produced Aluminium Plasma

In laser wakefield accelerator, usually a gas target is used to generate plasma medium. With this gas target, the pressure of the system cannot be keep as low as possible for electron beam application such as seeding the storage ring. To reduce this vacuum problem in LWFA, a plasma generated from solid Al target was used as plasma medium. A fundamental beam from the Q-switched ns pump laser in the Ti:sapphire power amplifier was used to generate a plasma from solid Al target. The plasma density was controlled by changing the distance between the main laser pulse for electron acceleration and the solid target. The plasma density was measured by the interferometer. The measured density indicates that the average charge of the ion in pre-plasma was 4.4. The main pulse ionized the Al plasma up to Al XII which means that the ionization injection could be used as an injection scheme. A 28 TW fs laser was used to accelerate the electron. A quasi-monochromatic electron was generated. The peak energy was 70 MeV and energy spread was 15 %. The divergence of the beam was 12 mrad in horizontal direction and 6 mrad in vertical direction.
Proceedings of the 37th International Free Electron Laser Conference, FEL2015, Daejeon, Republic of Korea