Author: Anania, M.P.
Paper Title Page
MOP113 High Quality Electron Beams Generated in a Laser Wakefield Accelerator 307
 
  • W.A. Gillespie
    University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom
  • M.P. Anania, C. Aniculaesei, E. Brunetti, S. Cipiccia, B. Ersfeld, M.R. Islam, R.C. Issac, D.A. Jaroszynski, G.G. Manahan, R.P. Shanks, G.H. Welsh, S.M. Wiggins
    USTRAT/SUPA, Glasgow, United Kingdom
  • S.P. Jamison
    STFC/DL/ASTeC, Daresbury, Warrington, Cheshire, United Kingdom
  • A. MacLeod
    UAD, Dundee, United Kingdom
 
  Funding: The U.K. EPSRC, the EC's Seventh Framework Programme (LASERLAB-EUROPE / LAPTECH, grant agreement no. 228334) and the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project.
The Advanced Laser-Plasma High-Energy Accelerators towards X-rays (ALPHA-X) programme is developing laser-plasma accelerators for the production of ultra-short electron beams as drivers of incoherent and coherent radiation sources from plasma and magnetic undulators. Here we report on the latest laser wakefield accelerator experiments on the University of Strathclyde ALPHA-X accelerator beam line looking at narrow energy spread electron beams. ALPHA-X uses a 26 TW Ti:sapphire laser (energy 900 mJ, duration 35 fs) focused into a helium gas jet (nozzle length 2 mm) to generate high quality monoenergetic electron beams with central energy in the range 80-180 MeV. The beam is fully characterised in terms of the charge, transverse emittance, energy spread and bunch length. In particular, the energy spectrum (with less than 1% measured energy spread) is obtained using a high resolution magnetic dipole imaging spectrometer.