The extremely high electric fields sustainable by a plasma make the Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) the most compact technique to generate very highly relativistic electron beams in the GeV regime. The limited repetition rate and low efficiency of this technology has, to date, prevented to unleash its full potential as a unique source for basic research, biomedical applications and high flux sources of secondary radiations as hard X-rays and gamma-rays. In very recent years different works show a new research direction on electron acceleration at 1 kHz repetition rate.
In this talk I will show the laser-driven acceleration of unprecedented, collimated (2 mrad) and quasi-monoenergetic (ΔE/E = 25%) electron beams with energy up to 50 MeV at 1 kHz repetition rate. The laser driver is the in-house developed L1-Allegra multi-cycle (15 fs) 1 kHz OPCPA system, operating at 26 mJ (1.7 TW).
Said innovative results have been achieved in the new Laser Wakefield ALFA platform for user experiments developed at ELI-Beamlines.
The scalability of the driver laser technology and the electron beams reported in this work pave the way towards developing high brilliance X-ray sources for medical imaging, innovative devices for brain cancer treatment and represent a step forward to the realization of a kHz GeV electron beamline.
Electron-laser colliders are a unique tool to investigate different fundamental phenomena, as for example the Breit-Wheeler process. Several experiments are working in this direction as of now, both based on conventional electron accelerator technology or on all-optical schemes.
In the landscape of high power laser facilities, ELI-Beamlines has two unique lasers which have the potential to enable laser-electron collisions at unprecedented parameters: L3-HAPLS (30 J, 30 fs, 10 Hz) and L4-Aton (1.5 kJ, 150 fs, 100s shots/day). In ELI-ELBA, the L3 laser pulses are split in two by a 50:50 wavefront splitting mirror. The central part of the beam is focused by a 10 meter focal length off-axis parabola into a gas jet to generate GeV electron beams by laser wakefield acceleration. The outer part of the beam is focused on the electron beam by a f/1.5 off-axis parabola with a hole.
The installation of ELI-ELBA and the results of the technical commissioning at low-power (L3 front-end) will be presented, along with the experiments proposed by the user community. The designed upgrade of ELI-ELBA for 10 PW experiments will be also presented.
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