Laser electron acceleration in cm-scale capillary-discharge plasma channel

Kameshima, Takashi; Kotaki, Hideyuki; Kando, Masaki; Daito, Izuru; Kawase, Keigo; Fukuda, Yuji; Chen, L. M.*; Homma, Takayuki; Kondo, Shuji; Esirkepov, T. Z.; Bobrova, N. A.*; Sasorov, P. V.*; Bulanov, S. V.; Hong, W.*; Sugiyama, Kiyohiro*; Wen, X.*; Wu, Y.*; Tang, C.*; Zhu, Q.*; Gu, Y.*; Zhang, B.*; Peng, H. S.*; Kurokawa, Shinichi*; Tajima, Toshiki; Kumita, Tetsuro*; Nakajima, Kazuhisa*

The acceleration method of laser plasma electron acceleration has very strong electric field, however, the acceleration length is veryshort. Hence, the energy gain of electron beams were confined to be approximately 100 MeV. Recently, this problem was solved by using discharge capillary. The feature of plasma was used that high dense plasma has low refractive index. Distributing plasma inside capillary as low dense plasma is in the center of capillary and high dense plasma is in the external side of capillary can make a laser pulse propaget inside capillary with initial focal spot size. Experiments with capillary were performed in China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) and Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). We obtained the results of 4.4 J laser pulse optical guiding in 4 cm capillary and 0.56 GeV electron production in CAEP in 2006, and 1 J laser pulse optical guiding in 4 cm capillary and electron beams productions.