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Femtosecond-laser-driven wire-guided helical undulator for intense terahertz radiation

Nature Photonics volume 11, pages 242–246 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

The capability of synchrotron radiation to produce ultrabright emission has attracted considerable interest over the last half a century. To date, magnetic undulators with a period of several centimetres are commonly used for wiggling relativistic electrons in a modulated field. Here, we propose a novel compact undulator with a period down to the submillimetre level based on a spontaneous electric field that is driven by a femtosecond laser. Both the guided energetic electrons and the gyrotron-like undulator are spontaneously produced by irradiating a thin metallic wire with an intense laser pulse. An intense radial electric field instantaneously created on the wire can guide the electrons' helical motion along the wire and induce periodic THz emission. We have demonstrated that this scheme can produce intense THz sources with a conversion efficiency of 1% that are frequency-tunable by adjusting the diameter of the wire. Amplified emission of THz radiation by more than tenfold has been observed.

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Figure 1: Schematic of a laser-driven wire-guided undulator for terahertz emission.
Figure 2: Characterization of LWGU THz radiation.
Figure 3: Simulations of the electrons' trajectories and radiation.
Figure 4: Characterization of simulated THz radiation.

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Acknowledgements

Fruitful discussions with B.B. Jin in Nanjing University and Y.T. Li in the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences are appreciated. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos 11425418, 11127901, 61521093, 11405244), the Shanghai Natural Science Funds (contract no.14ZR1444800), the Strategic Priority Research Program (B) (grant no. XDB16), State Key Laboratory Program of Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, Key Laboratory for Laser Plasmas (Ministry of Education), Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the National Basic Research Program of China (2014CB339802).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of High Field Laser Physics, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201800, China

    Ye Tian, Jiansheng Liu, Yafeng Bai, Shiyi Zhou, Haiyi Sun, Ruxin Li & Zhizhan Xu

  2. Collaborative Innovation Center of IFSA, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Jiansheng Liu, Ruxin Li & Zhizhan Xu

  3. Institute of Modern Optics, Nankai University, Key Laboratory of Optical Information Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Tianjin, 300071, China

    Weiwei Liu & Jiayu Zhao

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Ruxin Li

  5. School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, 20031, China

    Ruxin Li & Zhizhan Xu

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  1. Ye Tian
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Correspondence to Jiansheng Liu, Weiwei Liu, Ruxin Li or Zhizhan Xu.

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Tian, Y., Liu, J., Bai, Y. et al. Femtosecond-laser-driven wire-guided helical undulator for intense terahertz radiation. Nature Photon 11, 242–246 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2017.16

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