Optical steering of electron beam in laser plasma accelerators

Automated control and stabilization of ultrabroadband laser pulse angular dispersion

We present an innovative automatic control of angular dispersion for high-power laser systems. A novel, to the best of our knowledge, diagnostic has been developed to visualize angular dispersion in ultrashort near-infrared laser pulses for on-shot analysis. The output of a commercial ultrabroadband oscillator was prepared with an arbitrary chromatic dispersion and sent through a compensation system composed of 4° glass wedges in motorized mounts. These wedges were rotationally controlled in discrete steps about the beam axis in accordance with the diagnostic, via an automated feedback loop, to successfully eliminate angular dispersion to a precision of 5 nrad/nm. The system can be implemented to maintain a zero or nonzero target dispersion for experiments.

Single-shot measurements of pulse-front tilt in intense ps laser pulses and its effect on accelerated electron and ion beam characteristics (invited)

We report recent single-shot spatiotemporal measurements of laser pulses, including pulse-front tilt (PFT) and spatial chirp, taken at the Compact Multipulse Terawatt laser at the Jupiter Laser Facility in Livermore, CA. STRIPED FISH, a device that measures the complete 3D electric field of fs to ps laser pulses on a single shot, was adapted to near infrared for these measurements. We present the design of the instrument used for these experiments, the on-shot measurements of systematic high-order PFT, and shot-to-shot variations in the measurements of spatiotemporal couplings. Finally, we simulate the effect of PFT in target normal sheath acceleration experiments. These simulations showed that pulse front tilt can steer hot electrons, shape the distribution of the accelerating sheath field, and increase the variability of cutoff energy in the resulting proton spectra. While these effects may be detrimental to experimental accuracy if the pulse front tilt is left unmeasured, hot electron steering shows promise for precision manipulation of the particle source for a range of applications, including irradiation of secondary targets for opacity measurements, radiography, or neutron generation.

Spatio-spectral couplings in saturated collinear OPCPA

Ultrafast laser pulses featuring both high spatio-temporal beam quality and excellent energy stability are crucial for many applications. Here, we present a seed laser with high beam quality and energy stability, based on a collinear optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) stage, delivering 46 µJ pulses with a 25 fs Fourier limit at 1 kHz repetition rate. While saturation of the OPCPA stage is necessary for achieving the highest possible energy stability, it also leads to a degradation of the beam quality. Using simulations, we show that spectrally dependent, rotationally symmetric aberrations dominate the collinear OPCPA in saturation. We experimentally characterize these aberrations and then remove distinct spatial frequencies to greatly improve the spectral homogeneity of the beam quality, while keeping an excellent energy stability of 0.2 % rms measured over 70 hours.

Jitter-free 40-fs 375-keV electron pulses directly accelerated by an intense laser beam and their application to direct observation of laser pulse propagation in a vacuum

We report the generation of ultrashort bright electron pulses directly driven by irradiating a solid target with intense femtosecond laser pulses. The duration of electron pulses after compression by a phase rotator composed of permanent magnets was measured as 89 fs via the ponderomotive scattering of electron and laser pulses, which were almost at the compression limit due to the dispersion of the electron optics. The electron pulse compression system consisting of permanent magnets enabled extremely high timing stability between the laser pulse and electron pulse. The long-term RMS arrival time drift was below 14 fs in 4 h, which was limited by the resolution of the current setup. Because there was no time-varying field to generate jitter, the timing jitter was essentially reduced to zero. To demonstrate the capability of the ultrafast electron pulses, we used them to directly visualize laser pulse propagation in a vacuum and perform 2D mapping of the electric fields generated by low-density plasma in real time.