Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

DOI

10.1209/0295-5075/126/12003

Publication Title

Europhysics Letters

Volume

126

Issue

1

Pages

12003 (1-7)

Abstract

We present a new method for computation of radiation spectra in the non-linear regime of operation of inverse Compton sources characterized by high laser intensities. The resulting simulations agree well with the experiments. Increasing the laser intensity changes the longitudinal velocity of the electrons during their collision, leading to considerable non-linear broadening in the scattered radiation spectra. The effects of such ponderomotive broadening are so deleterious that most inverse Compton sources either remain at low laser intensities or pay a steep price to operate at a small fraction of the physically possible peak spectral output. This ponderomotive broadening can be reduced by a suitable frequency modulation (also referred to as "chirping", which is not necessarily linear) of the incident laser pulse, thereby drastically increasing the peak spectral density. This frequency modulation, included in the new code as an optional functionality, is used in simulations to motivate the experimental implementation of this transformative technique.

Rights

© EPLA 2019.

Published by the EPLA under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) License.

Comments

We are grateful to Mohammed Zubair for his insight and consultation into computational methods.

This paper is authored by Jefferson Science Associates, LLC under U.S. DOE Contract No. DE-AC05-06OR23177. BT acknowledges the support from the U.S. National Science Foundation award No. 1535641.

Original Publication Citation

Terzić, B., Brown, A., Drebot, I., Hagerman, T., Johnson, E., Krafft, G. A., Maroli, C., Petrillo, V., & Ruijter, M. (2019). Improving performance of inverse Compton sources through laser chirping. Europhysics Letters, 126(1), 1-7, Article 12003. https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/126/12003

ORCID

0000-0002-9646-8155 (Terzić), 0000-0002-0328-5828 (Krafft)

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