Self-injected petawatt laser-driven plasma electron acceleration in 1017 cm−3 plasma

We report production of a self-injected, collimated (8 mrad divergence), 600 pC bunch of electrons with energies up to 350 MeV from a petawatt laser-driven plasma accelerator in a plasma of electron density ne = 1017 cm−3, an order of magnitude lower than previous self-injected laser-plasma accelerators. The energy of the focused drive laser pulse (150 J, 150 fs) was distributed over several hot spots. Simulations show that these hot spots remained independent over a 5 cm interaction length, and produced weakly nonlinear plasma wakes without bubble formation capable of accelerating pre-heated (~1 MeV) plasma electrons up to the observed energies. The required pre-heating is attributed tentatively to pre-pulse interactions with the plasma.

X-ray shadowgraphy applications in ablatively accelerated planar foil studies

The article reviews experiments on flash X radiography of laser-accelerated foils. The spatial resolution, sensitivity, spectral range, and signal-to-noise ratio of measurements were carefully optimized and characterized. The method was used at the Mishen facility to measure a distribution of mass ablative rate across the focal spot and for observation of the transverse plasma flows during the drive laser pulse.