Session QP1 - Poster Session VII.
ORAL session, Thursday morning, November 14
Grand Ballroom CDE, Rosen Centre Hotel
In recent years, methods for acceleration of background plasma electrons by laser wakefields received much attention as they do not require external beam injections. At KERI we have an ongoing research to trap and accelerate background plasma electrons by a laser wakefield in the presence of a sharp downward density gradient, in which the scale length of the density gradient is shorter than the plasma wavelength. In order to investigate the trapping phenomenon, 2-D particle-in-cell simulations with the OSIRIS code have been performed. The simulation results show that background plasma electrons can be trapped and accelerated to several tens of MeV when an intense laser pulse passes through a downward density step of n_0^I=5\times 10^18 cm^-3 and n_0^II=3.5\times 10^18 cm^-3. In this presentation, detailed simulation results are given. In addition, the planned experiment for trapping with a table-top TW laser is introduced.