Counter-crossing injection for stable high-quality electron beam generation via laser-plasma interaction

Kotaki, Hideyuki; Daito, Izuru; Hayashi, Yukio; Ma, J.-L.; Chen, L.-M.; Kando, Masaki; Esirkepov, T. Z.; Fukuda, Yuji; Homma, Takayuki; Pirozhkov, A. S.; Koga, J. K.; Nakajima, Kazuhisa; Daido, Hiroyuki; Bulanov, S. V.

Laser-driven plasma accelerators have been conceived to be the next-generation particle accelerators, promising ultrahigh field particle acceleration with a very short duration electron beam. In the case of electron beam generation by using one laser pulse via wavebreaking, however, it is not stable. In order to generate a stable high-quality electron beam, optical injection by collision of two laser pulses is proposed. Recently, the electron generation with this approach was demonstrated. The experiment was carried out by the perfect head-on collision, which has problems to the backward laser light and the extraction of the generated electron beam. The counter-crossing injection, which is a realistic setup for applications, by two sub-relativistic laser pulses collision with the colliding angle of 45 is demonstrated. The collision of two laser pulses generates a high-quality electron beam with high repeatability. The generated monoenergetic electron beam has 14.4 MeV of the peak energy, 10.6% of the energy spread, 21.8 pC of the charge, 1.6 mm mrad of the normalized emittance, and 47.4% of the repeatability.