Self-Injection and Acceleration of Monoenergetic Electron Beams from Laser Wakefield Accelerators in a Highly Relativistic Regime

Self-injection and acceleration of monoenergetic electron beams from laser wakefield accelerators are first investigated in the highly relativistic regime, using 100TW class, 27fs laser pulses. Quasi-monoenergetic multi-bunched beams with energies as high as multi-hundredMeV are observed with simultaneous measurements of side-scattering emissions that indicate the formation of self-channelling and self-injection of electrons into a plasma wake, referred to as a `bubble'. The three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations confirmed multiple self-injection of electron bunches into the bubble and their beam acceleration with gradient of 1.5GeV/cm.