Colliding ionization injection in a plasma wakefield accelerator

A new scheme of generating high quality electron bunches via ionization injection triggered by an counter propagating laser pulse inside a beam driven plasma wake is proposed and examined via two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. This scheme has two major advantages: first, the injection distance is easily tunable by varying the launching time or the focal position of the laser pulse; second, the electrons in each injected slice are released at nearly the same time. Both factors can significantly reduce the phase space mixing during the ionization injection process (Xu et al 2014 Phys. Rev. Lett. 112 035003, Xu et al 2014 Phys. Rev. Spec. Top.: Accel. Beams 17 061301, Li et al 2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 111 015003), leading to very small energy spreads (∼10 keV for slice,∼100 keV for the whole bunch) and very small normalized emittance (∼few nm). As an example, a 4.5 fs 0.4 pC electron bunch with normalized emittance of 3.3 nm, slice energy spread of 13 keV, absolute energy spread of 80 keV, and a brightness of A m^-2rad^-2 is obtained under realistic conditions. This scheme may have potential applications for future compact coherent light sources.