Electron Beam Properties for Power Scaling for Laser Wakefield Acceleration in 2.5D Particle-in-Cell Simulations

Advancements in laser technology have led to dramatic increases in laser pulse power, from the terawatt (TW, 1012 W) scale to the petawatt (PW, 1015 W) level at a select number of facilities just within the past decade. Next-generation facilities are now being designed to deliver tens of petawatts, such as NSF OPAL. Extreme pulse powers enable the generation of ultra-high field strengths that drive techniques such as laser wakefield accelerations (LWFA). In LWFA, electrons are accelerated to relativistic energies by longitudinal electric fields on the order of gigavolts per meter (GV/m) far beyond what traditional accelerators achieve. This makes LWFA a promising candidate for next-generation particle accelerators. With this in mind, we ask how scaling pulse powers affects electron beam parameters in LWFA, such as charge and the energy spectrum, and we address this by performing large-scale 2.5 D Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations to study their evolution and optimization, corresponding to capabilities of the NSF ZEUS and OPAL facilities. Based on our modeling, we accredit the changes in the electron beam properties to the wakefield structures generated and the associated accelerating and focusing fields under the specified laser conditions.These conditions are favorable for the optimization of future high-power LWFA experiments and accelerators.

This work was supported by STROBE: A National Science Foundation Science & Technology Center under Grant No. DMR-1548924, and by award number PHY-2329970.