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electron acceleration
Laser-driven plasma waves have been proposed long time ago as compact electron accelerators owing to their longitudinal accelerating electric fields exceeding those of conventional accelerators by several orders of magnitude. We have predicted that strongly driving these waves results in their breaking, implying the formation of a strongly-curved wave (bubble), which can capture and forward accelerate a large number of electrons, yielding super-relativistic mono-energetic electron bunches in a collimated beam. Although demonstrated with multi-cycle drivers, bubble acceleration ideally requires laser pulses shorter than half the plasma wavelength, implying a pulse duration shorter than 10 fs. Our few-cycle, multiterawatt pulses from LWS-10 have allowed for the first time stable, few-femtosecond, mono-energetic, super-relativistic electron acceleration free from low-energy background and at a 10 Hz repetition rate.
In our dedicated HF-6 beamline, we aim at scaling this unique few-cycle-driven electron accelerator towards electron bunches carrying nanocoulomb charge within few-fs/sub-fs duration by upgrading our 20-TW-LWS-20 source to shorter pulse duration (8fs→5fs) and higher peak powers (20TW→100TW) and by optimizing the accelerating plasma wave towards controlled, single-cycle operation, by staging, and by improved ways of seeding the plasma wave with electrons. We pursue full temporal characterization of the acceleration process as well as the resultant electron bunches with few-fs to sub-fs resolution. Last but not least, we envision the generation and measurement of attosecond relativistic electron bunches by sub-fs energy modulation and slicing via the inverse free-electron laser technique implemented with waveform-controlled few-cycle light. These goals will be pursued in close collaboration with world-leading theorists: J. Meyer-ter-Vehn, H. Ruhl, and T. Tajima.
Applications of these unique electron pulse will range from fsec/asec electron diffraction to the development of compact brilliant fsec/asec X-ray sources.

contact: L.Veiszlink to the personal page of Laszlo Veisz, K. Schmid
references:
Few-Cycle Laser-Driven Electron Acceleration, K. Schmid et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 124801 (2009)
Fig. 1. First plasma-wave electron accelerator driven by laser pulses shorter than half the plasma wave period generates highly-collimated (∼4mrad), near-monoenergetic (∼4%) superrelativistic (> 10 MeV) electron bunches at unprecedentedly low (∼40 mJ) laser pulse energies.
Fig. 1. First plasma-wave electron accelerator driven by laser pulses shorter than half the plasma wave period generates highly-collimated (∼4mrad), near-monoenergetic (∼4%) superrelativistic (> 10 MeV) electron bunches at unprecedentedly low (∼40 mJ) laser pulse energies.
Fig. 2. Route to extending attosecond technology to relativistic interactions: principle of sub-fs electron bunch slicing, by light-field-induced energy modulation of a relativistic electron beam.
Fig. 2. Route to extending attosecond technology to relativistic interactions: principle of sub-fs electron bunch slicing, by light-field-induced energy modulation of a relativistic electron beam.