Towards a compact laser wakefield accelerator at kilohertz repetition rate

Laser wakefield acceleration is a rapidly developing technology to make electron accelerators more compact and cost effective including for ultrafast particle and photon sources. To further mature this technology for demanding applications such as table-top free-electron lasers or inverse Compton scattering, stability, beam quality, and repetition rate need to be improved. The frequency of mechanical instabilities typically falls below 200 Hz. Operating a wakefield accelerator at a kHz rate thus not only offers the flux needed for applications, but also the opportunity for active feedback to stabilize the accelerator and to enable techniques that will improve beam quality. This poster reports on the recent progress on commissioning a kHz laser wakefield accelerator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. We have established a platform with a single-box commercial off-the-shelf kHz laser frontend, spectrally broadened in a hollow-core fiber, and subsequently compressed with chirped mirrors to sub-5 fs pulse duration. Focusing these few-cycle pulses to relativistic peak intensities allows for resonant excitation of plasma waves, in which electrons can be accelerated to several MeVs of energy within a sub-millimeter scale plasma.