Laser wakefield plasma accelerators

International audienceOver the past several years there have been significant advances in research towards generating compact relativistic electron beams using high power short pulse laser produced plasmas (i.e., laser wakefield accelerators). In particular, an explosion of interest was generated in this field following the discovery in 2004 of a method to create such beams with low energy spread using a plasma bubble shaped wake. Recent work has increased the energy of these beams to the GeV range by extending the acceleration distance from a few millimetres to several centimeters. From both experimental and theoretical work, a more complete understanding of this plasma bubble regime for electron acceleration has also been obtained, enabling a significant improvement in the output electron beam quality and stability. There is ongoing work to further improve the parameters and stability of these beams with the goal of constructing table-top 4th generation sources of coherent x-ray radiation