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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Few-cycle vortices from superradiant nonlinear Thomson scattering by a relativistic chirped mirror

B. H. Schaap1,*, P. W. Smorenburg2, and O. J. Luiten1

  • 1Department of Applied Physics, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
  • 2ASML Netherlands B.V., P.O. Box 324, 5500 AH Veldhoven, The Netherlands

  • *b.h.schaap@tue.nl
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Phys. Rev. Research 5, L032034 – Published 12 September, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.L032034

Abstract

We propose a scheme to generate few-cycle vortices based on nonlinear Thomson scattering by microbunched electrons from a circularly polarized laser pulse with chirped frequency. At sufficiently high intensities, the generation of harmonics that carry orbital angular momentum occurs. At the same time, the electrons collectively act as a relativistic chirped mirror, which superradiantly reflects a chosen harmonic into a single localized beat. Calculations show that a few-cycle soft x-ray vortex with gigawatt peak power can be generated if this scheme is applied to a pC electron bunch with a few MeV kinetic beam energy.

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Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. Research 5, L032034– Published 12 September, 2023
  • Received 21 December 2022
  • Accepted 14 July 2023
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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