Laser driven electron accelerator on a table-top

Abstract:
Ultrahigh intense (>10^18 W/cm^2) femtosecond duration laser pulse propagating in plasma excites relativistically moving large amplitude plasma wave in its wake similar to water waves created in the wake of a moving boat in a river. The electric field associated with the plasma wave is usually referred to as laser wakefield which is typically of the order of 100 GV/m - nearly four orders of magnitude higher compared to the conventional particle acceleration by radiofrequency electromagnetic waves excited in metallic cavities. Therefore, the laser driven plasma based technology enables generation of GeV electron beams from cm-scale table-top accelerator which could be much cheaper and affordable by small scale laboratories. In this talk, I shall discuss the basics of laser driven plasma based electron acceleration and present the
progress made in this field at Laser Plasma Division, RRCAT, Indore leading to high quality electron beams up to 50 MeV energy from sub-mm long plasma accelerating structures driven by table-top 10 TW Ti:Sapphire laser. In the end, I shall present current worldwide status of the field and provide future outlook.

About the Speaker:
Dr. B. S. Rao joined Laser Plasma Division, RRCAT, Indore in 2004 where he has developed experimental set-ups for variety of studies on laser driven plasma based electron acceleration. He has also developed important diagnostics for monitoring and control of laser-plasma interaction parameters and for characterization of electron beams with wide ranging spatial and spectral distributions. He has demonstrated generation of high quality electron beams of energy up to 50 MeV from table-top laser wakefield accelerator of < 1 mm length. His current interest is to extend the length of the accelerator to cm-scale and push the energy near to 1 GeV using 100 TW lasers.