In a multi-GeV laser-driven plasma accelerator the driving laser pulse must remain focused as it propagates through tens of centimetres of plasma of density 1017 cm-3. This distance is orders of magnitude greater than the Rayleigh range, and hence the laser pulse must be guided with low losses. Since many applications of laser-plasma accelerators will require that the pulse repetition rate is in the kilohertz range, methods for guiding relativistically-intense laser pulses at high repetition rates must be developed.
We describe the development of hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized (HOFI) plasma channels and conditioned HOFI channels, which can meet all of these challenging requirements. We present experiments and numerical simulations that show that hydrodynamic expansion of optical-field-ionized plasma columns can generate channels at low plasma densities. We show that guiding a conditioning pulse in a HOFI channel leads to the formation of long, very low loss plasma channels via ionization of the collar of neutral gas which surrounds the HOFI channel.
We describe proof-of-principle experiments in which we generated conditioned HOFI (CHOFI) waveguides with axial electron densities of ne0 ≈ 1×1017 cm−3 and a matched spot size of approximately 30 μm. We present hydrodynamic and particle-in-cell simulations which demonstrate that meter-scale, low-loss CHOFI waveguides could be generated with a total laser pulse energy of about 1 J per meter of channel.
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