All-optical beamlet train generation

One of the critical issues for the development of Laser Wake Field Acceleration (LWFA), which has the promise of creating table-top, GeV accelerators, is the loading of beamlets into the accelerating buckets. All optical injection schemes, which include LILAC [D. Umstadter et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 2073 (1996)], beat-wave colliding pulse injection [E. Esarey et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 14, 2682 (1997)], wave breaking injection, and phase-kick injection, provide a technique for doing so. Although a single bunch can have desirable properties such as energy spread of the order of a few percent, femtosecond duration, and low emittance (<1 mm-mrad), recent simulations show that such methods lead to efficiencies of transfer of plasma wave energy to beam energy that are low compared with conventional RF accelerators when only a single pulse is generated. Our latest simulations show that one can improve on this situation through the generation of a beamlet train. This can occur naturally through phase-kick injection at the front of the train and transverse wave breaking for the trailing pulses. The result is an efficiency improvement of the order of the number of beamlets in the train.