Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 223, 1197-1206 (2014)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2014-02173-3

Regular Article

Coherent acceleration by laser pulse echelons in periodic plasma structures

¹ University of Dusseldorf, 40225 Dusseldorf, Germany
² University of Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod 603950, Russia
³ Institute of Applied Physics RAS, Nizhny Novgorod 603950, Russia
⁴ DGAR-IZEST, Ecole Polytechnique, Route de Saclay, 91128 Palaiseau Cedex, France

Received: 13 March 2014
Revised: 24 March 2014
Published online: 4 June 2014

Abstract

We consider a possibilty to use an echelon of mutually coherent laser pulses generated by the emerging CAN (Coherent Amplification Network) technology for direct particle acceleration in periodic plasma structures. We discuss resonant and free streaming configurations. The resonant plasma structures can trap energy of longer laser pulses but are limited to moderate laser intensities of about 10¹⁴ W/cm² and are very sensitive to the structure quality. The free streaming configurations can survive laser intensities above 10¹⁸ W/cm² for several tens of femtoseconds so that sustained accelerating rates well above TeV/m are feasible. In our full electromagnetic relativistic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations we show a test electron bunch gaining up to 200 GeV over a distance of 10.2 cm only.