Electron acceleration

Modern accelerators use RF cavities to accelerate electrons, but their technical limitations require building several cavities to reach required electron energies. As an example, in hard X-ray Free Electron Lasers, the length of the accelerating sections can reach several kilometers.

Ultrafast Lasers Enabling LWFA

Ultrafast intense lasers have revolutionized the accelerator community, by opening new ways of accelerating electrons, called Laser Wakefield Acceleration. This technology allows the accelerating gradient to increase by 3 orders of magnitude, paving the way for compact accelerators.
The scientific community is actively working on exploiting this unique capacity to bring this technological brick to the new accelerator architectures.

The key parameters for such acceleration process are the pulse energy, pulse duration, repetition rate and temporal contrast.
Amplitude has a long experience in developing and delivering intense lasers based on Ti:Saph technology, with a particular caution on pulse quality to ensure optimal plasma formation.

Additionally, Amplitude continuously improves the repetition rate availability on Ti:Saph lasers, demonstrating recently 700TW at 10Hz, as well as providing solutions at 100Hz repetition rate and beyond.

Finally, Amplitude continuously increases the energy and average power of Ytterbium technology, opening the way to electron acceleration at multi-kilohertz repetition rate soon.

Electron accelaration lasers for science - Amplitude Laser

Key Components and Processes

Conventional accelerators rely on RF cavities, which require kilometers of structures to reach high electron energies. Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) uses ultrafast intense lasers to achieve accelerating gradients up to 1,000 times higher, enabling compact accelerator designs. The main laser parameters are pulse energy, pulse duration, repetition rate, and temporal contrast:

  • Ti:Sapphire lasers: extremely intense pulses with optimized quality for plasma formation, recently demonstrated at 700 TW (10 Hz) and scalable to 100 Hz and beyond.
  • Ytterbium lasers: steadily increasing in energy and average power, offering robust solutions for next-generation accelerator architectures.

Ready to connect?

Let our experts help you in the development of your applications

Contact us

Recommended products

Picture of Ti:Sapphire Arco

Arco

The best of Ti:Sapphire technology Arco - the class of ultra-intense fs laser systems designed as the ideal light source for the most demanding applications....
  • Pulse Duration
    From < 20 fs to < 100 fs
  • Peak Power
    Up to 120 TW
  • Energy Per Pulse
    From 5 mJ to 2,7 J

Pulsar PW

Ultra intense ultrafast laser Pulsar PW is the ultimate light source dedicated to high field science, offering the best-in-class performance and bringing industrial-grade reliability to...
  • Pulse Duration
    < 23 fs
  • Peak Power
    From > 0,5 PW to > 2,5 PW
  • Energy Per Pulse
    From > 12 to > 60 J

Pulsar TW

Pulsar TW is the state-of-the-art high intensity laser for high field science. It offers best-in-class performance with industrial-grade reliability in a compact footprint. This laser...
  • Pulse Duration
    < 23 fs
  • Peak Power
    From > 25 TW to > 400 TW
  • Energy Per Pulse
    From> 0,5 to > 9 J
Ytterbium Magma laser

Magma

Magma is the world’s first industrial-grade ultrafast laser platform delivering up to 500 mJ pulse energy in picosecond or sub-picosecond regime. The diode-pumped technology...
  • Pulse Duration
    < 700 fs to 10 ps
  • Peak Power
    > 4 GW ~ > 1 TW
  • Energy Per Pulse
    From 5 mJ to 500 mJ