Dense Helical Electron Bunch Generation in Near-Critical Density Plasmas with Ultrarelativistic Laser Intensities

Ronghao Hu; Bin Liu; Haiyang Lu; Meilin Zhou; Chen Lin; Zhengming Sheng; Chia-erh Chen; Xiantu He; Xueqing Yan

doi:10.1038/srep15499

Dense Helical Electron Bunch Generation in Near-Critical Density Plasmas with Ultrarelativistic Laser Intensities

Sci Rep. 2015 Oct 27:5:15499. doi: 10.1038/srep15499.

Authors

Ronghao Hu¹, Bin Liu^{1

2}, Haiyang Lu¹, Meilin Zhou¹, Chen Lin¹, Zhengming Sheng³, Chia-erh Chen¹, Xiantu He^{1

2}, Xueqing Yan¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, and Key Laboratory of HEDP of the Ministry of Education, CAPT, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
² Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing, 100088, China.
³ Department of Physics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.

Abstract

The mechanism for emergence of helical electron bunch(HEB) from an ultrarelativistic circularly polarized laser pulse propagating in near-critical density(NCD) plasma is investigated. Self-consistent three-dimensional(3D) Particle-in-Cell(PIC) simulations are performed to model all aspects of the laser plasma interaction including laser pulse evolution, electron and ion motions. At a laser intensity of 10(22) W/cm(2), the accelerated electrons have a broadband spectrum ranging from 300 MeV to 1.3 GeV, with the charge of 22 nano-Coulombs(nC) within a solid-angle of 0.14 Sr. Based on the simulation results, a phase-space dynamics model is developed to explain the helical density structure and the broadband energy spectrum.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't