Speaker
Description
Laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) can sustain accelerating gradients that greatly surpass those of conventional accelerators. Long ($\sim$ps) and intense ($>$TW) laser pulses have been employed in LWFAs to generate bright, hard x-rays which are of interest for imaging and diagnosing warm-dense matter. The CO$_2$ laser at the ATF facility of the Brookhaven National Laboratory is a unique source, which can generate $>$2 ps-long, multi-TW laser pulses in the mid-IR (9-10 $\mu$m) regime. At a plasma density of $\sim 2\times 10^{17}$ cm$^{-3}$, this laser pulse encompasses hundreds of plasma skin depths, creating three interaction regions with distinct characteristics: laser self-modulation, transverse laser disruption and laser self-channeling. In this talk, numerical results will be presented to show the main properties of this interaction. An electron beam travelling transversely with respect to the direction of laser propagation is used to probe the fields in the three interaction regions. These simulation results as well as the preparations for future experiments will be discussed. The simulations were done using the Particle in Cell code OSIRIS [R.A.Fonseca et al., LNCS (2331) 342, 2002].
Acknowledging funding from DOE Grant No. 215125 and resources of NERSC facility, operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and SEAWULF cluster at Stony Brook University.
| Working group | Diagnostics |
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