Abstract
Applications of laser-plasma accelerators demand low energy spread beams and high-efficiency operation. Achieving both requires flattening the accelerating fields by controlled beam loading of the plasma wave. Here, we optimize the generation of an electron bunch via localized ionization injection, such that the combination of injected current profile and averaged acceleration dynamics results in optimal beam loading conditions. This enables the reproducible production of 1.2% rms energy spread bunches with 282 MeV and 44 pC at an estimated energy-transfer efficiency of . We correlate shot-to-shot variations to reveal the phase space dynamics and train a neural network that predicts the beam quality as a function of the drive laser.
- Received 11 August 2020
- Revised 16 December 2020
- Accepted 2 March 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.174801
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society