Scaling Laser Wakefield Acceleration into the Multi-Petawatt Regime

Multi-petawatt laser systems represent the next stage of laser driven particle accelerators and advanced light sources. Over the past several years, we have performed experiemnts on the ZEUS laser facility as each amplification stage has powered on, enabling us to observe electron and betatron x-ray measuremetns to be made from the hundred terawatt power level up to two petawatts. These experiments were performed with multiple endstations, and varying focal geometries to accomodate the increasing power. We show how overall parameters such as electron charge and energy change with laser power, while also examining other beam parameters that have less obvious dependencies on power. Similarly, the generated x-rays show substantial differences as we increase power that arent simply attributed to an energy scaling.