• J.E. Ralph, C. Joshi, J.B. Rosenzweig, C. Sung, S. Tochitsky
  UCLA, Los Angeles, California

To achieve phase locked injection of short electron bunches in a plasma beatwave accelerator, the Neptune Laboratory will utilize microbunching in an FEL or IFEL system. These systems require terahertz (THz) seed radiation on the order of 10 kW for the FEL and 10 MW for the IFEL bunchers. We report results of experiments on THz generation using nonlinear frequency mixing of CO2 laser lines in GaAs. A two-wavelength laser beam was split and sent onto a 2.5 cm long GaAs crystal cut for noncollinear phase matching. Low power measurements achieved ~1 W of 340 ?m radiation using 200 ns CO2 pump pulses with wavelengths 10.3?m and 10.6?m. We also demonstrated tunability of difference frequency radiation, producing 240?m by mixing two different CO2 laser lines. By going to shorter laser pulses and higher intensities, we were able to increase the conversion efficiency while decreasing the surface damage threshold. Using 200ps pulses we produced ~2 MW of 340 ?m radiation. Future studies in this area will focus on developing large diameter Quasi-Phase matched structures for production of high power THz radiation.

• A.E. Charman, R.R. Lindberg, J.S. Wurtele
  UCB, Berkeley, California
• L. Friedland
  The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Racah Institute of Physics, Jerusalem

A modified version of the Plasma Beat-Wave Accelerator scheme is introduced and analyzed, which is based on autoresonant phase-locking of the nonlinear Langmuir wave to the slowly chirped beat frequency of the driving lasers via adiabatic passage through resonance. This new scheme is designed to overcome some of the limitations of previous approaches, namely relativistic detuning and nonlinear modulations in the driven Langmuir wave amplitude, and sensitivity to frequency mismatch from density fluctuations. As in previous schemes, instabilities of the ionic background ultimately limit the useful interaction time, but nevertheless peak electric fields approaching the wave-breaking limit seem readily attainable. Compared to traditional approaches, the autoresonant scheme achieves larger accelerating electric fields for given laser intensity; the plasma wave excitation is more robust to variations in plasma density; it is largely insensitive to the choice of chirp rate, provided that chirping is sufficiently slow; and the quality and uniformity of the resulting plasma wave and its suitability for accelerator applications may be superior.

• S. Reiche, C. Joshi, C. Pellegrini, J.B. Rosenzweig, S. Tochitsky
  UCLA, Los Angeles, California
• G. Shvets
  The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas

Free-Electron Laser in the THz range can be used to generate high output power radiation or to modulate the electron beam longitudinally on the radiation wavelength scale. Microbunching on the scale of 1-5 THz is of particular importance for potential phase-locking of a modulated electron beam to a laser-driven plasma accelerating structure. However the lack of a seeding source for the FEL at this spectral range limits operation to a SASE FEL only, which denies a subpicosecond synchronization of the current modulation or radiation with an external laser source. One possibility to overcome this problem is to seed the FEL with two external laser beams, which difference (beat-wave) frequency is matched to the resonant FEL frequency in the THz range. In this presentation we study feasibility of an experiment on laser beat-wave injection in the THz FEL considered at the UCLA Neptune Laboratory, where both a high brightness photoinjector and a two-wavelength, TW-class CO2 laser system exist. By incorporating the energy modulation of the electron beam by the ponderomotive force of the beat-wave in a modified version of the time-dependent FEL code Genesis 1.3, the performance of a FEL at Neptune is simulated and analyzed.