Performance of capillary discharge guided laser plasma wakefieldaccelerator

A GeV-class laser-driven plasma-based wakefield acceleratorhas been realized at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).The device consists of the 40TW high repetition rate Ti:sapphire LOASISlaser system at LBNL and a gas-filled capillary discharge waveguidedeveloped at Oxford University. The operation of the capillary dischargeguided laser plasma wakefield accelerator with a capillaryof 225 mu mdiameter and 33 mm in length was analyzed in detail. The input intensitydependence suggests that excessive self-injection causes increased beamloading leading to broadband lower energy electron beam generation. Thetrigger versus laser arrival timing dependence suggests that the plasmachannel parameters can be tuned to reduce beam divergence