On the properties of synchrotron-like X-ray emission from laser wakefield accelerated electron beams
C. McGuffey, W. Schumaker, T. Matsuoka, V. Chvykov, F. Dollar, G. Kalintchenko, S. Kneip, Z. Najmudin, S. P. D. Mangles, M. Vargas, V. Yanovsky, A. Maksimchuk, A. G. R. Thomas, K. Krushelnick
Source abstract
The electric and magnetic fields responsible for electron acceleration in a Laser Wakefield Accelerator (LWFA) also cause electrons to radiate x-ray photons. Such x-ray pulses have several desirable properties including short duration and being well collimated with tunable high energy. We measure the scaling of this x-ray source experimentally up to laser powers greater than 100 TW. An increase in laser power allows electron trapping at a lower density as well as with an increased trapped charge. These effects resulted in an x-ray fluence that was measured to increase non-linearly with laser power. The fluence of x-rays was also compared with that produced from K-α emission resulting from a solid target interaction for the same energy laser pulse. The flux was shown to be comparable, but the LWFA x-rays had a significantly smaller source size. This indicates that such a source may be useful as a backlighter for probing high energy density plasmas with ultrafast temporal resolution.
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