NEAR-GEV ELECTRON BEAMS FROM THE LASER WAKEFIELD ACCELERATOR IN THE “BUBBLE ” REGIME

This paper describes a 2D-PIC simulation of a laser wakefield accelerator in which an ultrashort, petawatt-class laser is focused and propagated through an underdense preformed plasma. We are looking at the phase-spaces of a large number of background plasma electrons that are accelerated to very high energies by the laser-induced plasma bubble. The result shows the possibility of generating a GeV-level electron beam in a few millimeters plasma size. There are many interesting simulation and experimental studies for the generation of high-energy electron beams from the laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) scheme [1]. In particular, electrons self-trapping in the self-modulated (SM) LWFA [2], forced laser wakefield (FLWF) [3] an