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Prospects for free-electron lasers powered by plasma-wakefield-accelerated beams

Nature Photonics volume 18, pages 780–791 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Plasma-wakefield-based acceleration technology has the potential to revolutionize the field of particle accelerators. By providing acceleration gradients orders of magnitude larger than conventional radiofrequency particle accelerators, this technology allows accelerators to be reduced to the centimetre length scale. It also provides a new compact approach for driving free-electron lasers, a valuable source of high-brilliance ultrashort coherent radiation within the infrared to X-ray spectral range for the study of subatomic matter, ultrafast dynamics of complex systems and X-ray nonlinear optics, among other applications. Several laboratories around the world are working on the realization of these new light sources, exploring different configurations for the plasma wakefield driver beam, plasma stage design and operational regime. This Review describes the operating principles of plasma accelerators, an overview of recent experimental milestones for plasma-driven free-electron lasers in self-amplified spontaneous emission and seeded configurations, and highlights the remaining major challenges in the field.

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Fig. 1: General overview of the beam energy and energy spread performance of plasma-based and conventional accelerators.
Fig. 2: Schematic of a plasma-based FEL.
Fig. 3: Experimental set-up of the SASE LWFA-based FEL at SIOM-CAS.
Fig. 4: Experimental set-up of the seeded LWFA-based FEL at COXINEL-HZDR.
Fig. 5: Experimental set-up of the SASE and seeded PWFA-based FEL at SPARC_LAB.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the first authors and co-authors of refs. 37,38,40,41. Several of the authors acknowledge funding support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement numbers 101004730 (IFAST) and 101079773 (EuPRAXIA Preparatory Phase PP). W.W. acknowledges the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (grant number YSBR060) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 12105353).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy

    M. Galletti

  2. INFN–Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy

    M. Galletti

  3. NAST Centre, Rome, Italy

    M. Galletti

  4. GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstad, Germany

    R. Assmann

  5. Synchrotron SOLEIL, Saint-Aubin, France

    M. E. Couprie

  6. Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Frascati, Italy

    M. Ferrario, L. Giannessi & R. Pompili

  7. Sincrotrone Trieste, Basovizza, Italy

    L. Giannessi

  8. Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Dresden, Germany

    A. Irman

  9. State Key Laboratory of High Field Laser Physics and CAS Center for Excellence in Ultra-intense Laser Science, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

    W. Wang

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Galletti, M., Assmann, R., Couprie, M.E. et al. Prospects for free-electron lasers powered by plasma-wakefield-accelerated beams. Nat. Photon. 18, 780–791 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-024-01474-3

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