Author: Islam, M.R.
Paper Title Page
WEOAB03 The Production of High Quality Electron Beams in the ALPHA-X Laser Wakefield Accelerator 1956
 
  • S.M. Wiggins, 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
    USTRAT/SUPA, Glasgow, United Kingdom
  • W.A. Gillespie
    University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee, Scotland, 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 high quality 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 characterized in terms of the charge, bunch length, energy spread and transverse emittance. The energy spectrum (with less than 1% measured energy spread) is obtained using a high resolution magnetic dipole imaging spectrometer while pepper-pot mask measurements show that the normalized transverse emittance is as low as 1.1 pi mm mrad (resolution limited). The conditions needed to obtain this high quality are discussed.
 
slides icon Slides WEOAB03 [2.904 MB]