Femtosecond Laser-Plasma Particle Accelerator

Del Mar Photonics

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Femtosecond Laser-Plasma Particle Accelerator

Charged particle accelerators have numerous uses, ranging from television tubes to cancer therapy to the study of the fundamental forces of the universe. What they all have in common is that the particles, such as electrons or protons, are accelerated by electric or magnetic fields. Conventional accelerators , such as the 3 km-long one at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), use metal cavities to rectify radio-frequency waves to repeatedly charged particles along the beam line. The SLAC has to be 3 km long to achieve its target particle energies because the accelerating field of each cavity is limited. The field could be increased by using radio waves of shorter wavelength and greater intensity, but both of these properties are limited by the cavity: the cavity size limits the wavelength, and high intensities cause electronic breakdown of the metal cavity walls.

Laser-plasma particle accelerators avoid these limits by utilizing plasma instead of the cavity. With the highest-intensity pulses, particles might be accelerated directly, the same way that relativistic electrons are generated by the beam, allowing the plasma to be dispensed with (i.e. direct laser acceleration, DLA). In the past few years, laser-driven electron and proton accelerators have produced beams with energies greater than 50 MeV, comparable to a single stage (a few meters long) of a conventional accelerator. The laser system achieves the same energy in a millimeter. It will reduce the size of current conventional accelerators by three orders of magnitude, offering an low-cost and extremely compact high-energy electron source. Prompt laser acceleration with high gradients is another advantages. For example, electron beams of a few MeV whose the concentration of particles in the beam exceeds that of beams made by conventional accelerators, mainly because the charges bunched in one pulse of the beam have less time to blow it apart by its own electrostatic forces.

In addition, scientists have shown that low-cost laser accelerators are suitable for many of the same applications as conventional accelerators, such as producing short-lived radioisotopes used in medical diagnostics and generating neutron and positron beams for studies of materials. The laser systems create beams that have a relatively broad spread of particle energies, however, which is undesirable for some applications. Also, conventional systems routinely chain together numerous accelerator stages, as in SLAC's 3-km collider and the 7-km-circumference main ring of the Tevatron at Fermilab. Laser accelerators is a suitable candidate of electron injector for conventional accelerator. Current research on laser accelerator systems is concentrated on reducing the beam's energy spread and pulse duration and achieving multi-staging to increase the beam's energy. Scientists are also exploring the use of waveguides to increase the distance over which the wake field keeps accelerating particles.

Del Mar Photonics

Del Mar Photonics connection: Our customers at High-Field Physics and Ultrafast Laboratory Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences,
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan use Rincon TOCC (Third Order Cross Correlator) to determine the quality of laser pulses. The third order cross-correlator Rincon has been specifically developed for measuring a wide array of output parameters from ultrafast laser systems including: contrast ratio of laser pulses, determining pulse pedestal, pre- and post-pulses, and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) in femtosecond systems. It also provides information about the third-order cross-correlation function of pulse intensity on a femtosecond scale and can be used for alignment of high power femtosecond lasers.
Cross-correlator includes opto-mechanical assembly and electronics with USB interface. System is easy to operate and includes a full set of user friendly software tools for data collection and analysis.

Del Mar Photonics - Rincon cross correlator brochure

Rincon Third Order Cross-Correlator (TOCC)

Each Rincon is optimized for customer laser system and required range of measurements.
The complete setup geometry, dimensions of non-linear crystals and some essential optics
are all function of laser parameters and user-chosen tradeoffs between sensitivity, time resolution, time window, overall size etc.

We need the following information to set the tradeoffs and get all critical data necessary for the design which is optimized for your system.

1. Is the laser pulse chirped?
2. What is the spectral bandwidth?
3. What is the pulsewidth?
4a. What is the expected (or estimated) contrast ratio as a function of delay from peak
4b. What is the minimum necessary contrast ratio as a function of delay from peak
5. What is beam quality (i.e. beam divergence relative to diffraction-limited one)

Rincon third-order cross correlator (TOAC)

To request a quote for Rincon cross-correlator please e-mail sales@dmphotonics.com with detailed answers to the questions above.