Optical guiding of a radially polarized laser beam for inverseCherenkov acceleration in a plasma channel |
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Authors: | Serafim P Sprangle P Hafizi B |
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Institution: | Dept. of Electr. Eng., Northeastern Univ., Boston, MA; |
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Abstract: | In a conventional inverse Cherenkov accelerator (ICA), the background neutral gas provides the necessary dispersion to maintain the synchronism between the drive laser and the accelerated electrons. A laser-driven ICA is susceptible to diffraction, and the acceleration length is limited to approximately a Rayleigh range (for a Gaussian beam). In this paper, an ICA configuration is proposed that avoids the laser diffraction limitation by employing a preformed plasma channel. It is shown that a radially polarized laser beam can be optically guided if the plasma density increases with radius-like r2. Expressions for the guided axial and radial components of the laser field are derived, and a numerical example is discussed |
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