Laser-plasma acceleration Research at Shanghai Jiao Tong
University
Nasr A. M. Hafz a, Song Li, Mohammad Mirzaie, Ming Zeng, Min Chen, Zhengming
Sheng, and Jie Zhang
Key Laboratory for Laser Plasmas (MOE) and Department of Physics and Astronomy,
IFSA Collaborative Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240,
China
ABSTRACT:
Recently we conducted laser-plasma acceleration experiments at our laboratory in
Shanghai, China. The experiments are based upon a newly-installed 200 TW 30 fs
Ti:sapphire laser system. We have performed two types of laser wakefield acceleration
experiments, the first one was on electron self-injection in 4 mm-long pure He plasma
where we used 30 TW laser pulses focused down to 28 µm spot size (a0 ~1.2) and we
observed ~120 MeV electron beams with tens of percent energy-spread (FWHM). The
second type of experiments was based upon the ionization-injection where we observed
significant enhancements of the electron beam energy and quality compared with the selfinjection results. In the same experiment we focused 100 TW laser pulses onto 1 cm-long
gas jet where we observed narrow energy-spread beams at 1.2 giga-electron volts. The
experimental results are verified by 3D-PIC simulations. We believe that further
exploration of this regime at higher laser power may lead to the generation of electron
beams with even higher quality and energy allowing the realization of table-top X-ray free
electron lasers which, if realized, will bring a significant impact to science and technology.
In this talk, our results and discussions will be presented in great details.
KEYWORDS: TW-laser; Laser Wakefield Acceleration; Ionization Injection
a
Corresponding Author: Nasr A. M. Hafz, Email: nasr@sjtu.edu.cn