Electron Acceleration in a plasma produced by an intense laser pulse focusing on a dense gas jet target

M.Adachi, E.Miura1), S.Kato1), N.Saito1), K.Koyama1), Y.Kawada2), T.Nakamura3) and M.Tanimoto4)

Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima, Hiroshima 739-8530, Japan
1)National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8568, Japan
2)University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-1577, Japan
3)National Institute of Radiological Science, Chiba, Chiba 263-8555, Japan
4)Meisei University, Hino, Tokyo 191-8506, Japan

Since laser plasma accelerators have a great potential to realize higher accelerating electric field than the conventional accelerators, a lot of works on the laser plasma acceleration are performed to realize a compact accelerator. Although the monochromatic beam energy is preferable for applications, energy distributions obtained at many institutes have wide energy spread. We are performing electron acceleration experiments to obtain a suitable electron beam for the applications. The intense laser pulse of 2.0 TW (50 fsec, 100mJ) was focused on a surface of a dense gas jet. An intensity at a focal point was 5×1018 W/cm2. The number density of the quasi uniform nitrogen jet was 1×1018 molecule cm-3 (1.5 mm diameter). An energy spectrum of the electron beam was analyzed by the electron spectrometer (ESM) in the laser beam direction. The ESM consisted of a permanent magnet which produced the uniform magnetic field of 202mT and the Imaging Plate (IP) detector. The maximum energy of 30MeV was observed which was the limited by the ESM. One can clearly see an obvious energy peak at 6MeV in addition to the Boltzman-like energy distribution. A divergence angle of electrons was measured by the IP placed behind the metallic plate (2mm-thick Al and 1mm-thick Pb). The beam divergences were 10, 5.3 and 1.5 degrees at the energy of 1.3, 3.8 and 6 MeV, respectively. The charge of the electron beam (above 1.3 MeV) was estimated to be 200 pC/shot. We are now conducting the experiment to get a monochromatic-like electron beam.


A part of this work was supported by the Budget for Nuclear Research of the MEXT and the Advanced Compact Accelerator Department Program of the MEXT.