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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Resonant excitation of plasma waves in a plasma channel

A. J. Ross1, J. Chappell1, J. J. van de Wetering1, J. Cowley1, E. Archer1, N. Bourgeois2, L. Corner3, D. R. Emerson4, L. Feder1 et al.

X. J. Gu4, O. Jakobsson1,*, H. Jones3,†, A. Picksley1,‡, L. Reid3, W. Wang1, R. Walczak1,5, and S. M. Hooker1,§

  • 1John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science and Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH, United Kingdom
  • 2Central Laser Facility, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot OX11 0QX, United Kingdom
  • 3Cockcroft Institute for Accelerator Science and Technology, School of Engineering, The Quadrangle, University of Liverpool, Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L69 3GH, United Kingdom
  • 4Scientific Computing Department, STFC Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington WA4 4AD, United Kingdom
  • 5Somerville College, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HD, United Kingdom

  • *Deceased
  • †Now at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Notkestr. 85, 22607 Hamburg, Germany
  • ‡Now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • §simon.hooker@physics.ox.ac.uk
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Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022001 – Published 3 April, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.L022001

Abstract

We demonstrate resonant excitation of a plasma wave by a train of short laser pulses guided in a preformed plasma channel, for parameters relevant to a plasma-modulated plasma accelerator (P-MoPA). We show experimentally that a train of N≈10 short pulses, of total energy ∼1J, can be guided through 110mm long plasma channels with on-axis densities in the range 1017–1018cm−3. The spectrum of the transmitted train is found to be strongly red shifted when the plasma period is tuned to the intratrain pulse spacing. Numerical simulations are found to be in excellent agreement with the measurements and indicate that the resonantly excited plasma waves have an amplitude in the range 3–10GVm−1, corresponding to an accelerator stage energy gain of order 1GeV.

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Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022001– Published 3 April, 2024
  • Received 19 October 2023
  • Accepted 26 February 2024
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