Abstract
Laser–plasma acceleration1,2 is an emerging technique for accelerating electrons to high energies over very short distances. The accelerated electron bunches have femtosecond duration3,4, making them particularly relevant for applications such as ultrafast imaging5 or femtosecond X-ray generation6,7. Current laser–plasma accelerators deliver 100 MeV (refs 8–10) to GeV (refs 11, 12) electrons using Joule-class laser systems that are relatively large in scale and have low repetition rates, with a few shots per second at best. Nevertheless, extending laser–plasma acceleration to higher repetition rates would be extremely useful for applications requiring lower electron energy. Here, we use single-cycle laser pulses to drive high-quality MeV relativistic electron beams, thereby enabling kHz operation and dramatic downsizing of the laser system. Numerical simulations indicate that the electron bunches are only ∼1 fs long. We anticipate that the advent of these kHz femtosecond relativistic electron sources will pave the way to applications with wide impact, such as ultrafast electron diffraction in materials13,14 with an unprecedented sub-10 fs resolution15.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the help of the support team at the Photo-Injector facility at Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire for the absolute calibration of our phosphor screens. This work was funded by the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant FEMTOELEC) under contract no. 306708. Financial support from the Région Ile-de-France (under contract SESAME-2012-ATTOLITE), the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (under contracts ANR-11-EQPX-005-ATTOLAB and ANR-14-CE32-0011-03) and the Extreme Light Infrastructure-Hungary Non-Profit Ltd (under contract NLO3.6LOA) is gratefully acknowledged.
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A.V., B.B., D.Gué, D.Gus and J.F. built the laser–plasma experiment. D.Gué and D.Gus performed the experiment and analysed the data. F.B., M.B., M.L., A.J. and R.L.-M. developed the near-single-cycle laser system. A.L. performed the modelling of the experiment. J.F. and D.Gué wrote the paper with inputs from all co-authors. J.F. directed the project.
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Guénot, D., Gustas, D., Vernier, A. et al. Relativistic electron beams driven by kHz single-cycle light pulses. Nature Photon 11, 293–296 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2017.46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2017.46
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