Low-divergence femtosecond X-ray pulses from a passive plasma lens
Journal article, 2021

Electron and X-ray beams originating from compact laser-wakefield accelerators have very small source sizes that are typically on the micrometre scale. Therefore, the beam divergences are relatively high, which makes it difficult to preserve their high quality during transport to applications. To improve on this, tremendous efforts have been invested in controlling the divergence of the electron beams, but no mechanism for generating collimated X-ray beams has yet been demonstrated experimentally. Here we propose and realize a scheme where electron bunches undergoing focusing in a dense, passive plasma lens can emit X-ray pulses with divergences approaching the incoherent limit. Compared with conventional betatron emission, the divergence of this so-called plasma lens radiation is reduced by more than an order of magnitude in solid angle, while maintaining a similar number of emitted photons per electron. This X-ray source offers the possibility of producing brilliant and collimated few-femtosecond X-ray pulses for ultra-fast science, in particular for studies based on X-ray diffraction and absorption spectroscopy. X-ray pulses with low divergences are produced in a laser-wakefield accelerator by focusing electron bunches in a dense passive plasma lens.

Author

Jonas Bjorklund Svensson

Lund University

Diego Guenot

Lund University

Julien Ferri

University of Gothenburg

Chalmers, Physics, Subatomic, High Energy and Plasma Physics

Henrik Ekerfelt

Lund University

Stanford University

Isabel Gallardo Gonzalez

Lund University

Anders Persson

Lund University

Kristoffer Svendsen

Lund University

Laszlo Veisz

Umeå University

Olle Lundh

Lund University

Nature Physics

1745-2473 (ISSN) 17452481 (eISSN)

Vol. 17 5 639-645

Running away and radiating (PLASMA)

European Commission (EC) (EC/H2020/647121), 2015-10-01 -- 2020-09-30.

Subject Categories

Accelerator Physics and Instrumentation

Atom and Molecular Physics and Optics

Fusion, Plasma and Space Physics

DOI

10.1038/s41567-020-01158-z

More information

Latest update

3/2/2022 3