CIRCUMVENTING DEPHASING AND PUMP-DEPLETION FOR LONG AND STABLE SINGLE-STAGE PLASMA ACCELERATION: from flying-focus laser pulses to proton-bunch drivers

Wed, 20 May 2026 09:35:28 +0000

Terça-feira, 9 de Junho 2026 das 10:00 às 12:00

Anfiteatro PA3 (Piso -1 do Pavilhão de Matemática) do IST

Plasma wakefield acceleration offers accelerating gradients orders of magnitude beyond conventional technology. Making it widely applicable depends on finding methods to produce highquality charged-particle bunches. A critical question in this direction is how to effectively overcome pump depletion, enabling particles to be accelerated to ultra-relativistic energies in a single accelerator stage. This thesis addresses this challenge by pursuing two parallel routes to stable, single-stage acceleration.

First, we employ velocity-controlled spatio-temporal laser drivers to obtain wakefields with controllable phase velocity and apply them to the acceleration of short-lived particle beams. These shape-invariant pulses enable extended, depletion-free acceleration. We design a phase-locking scheme for decaying, sub-relativistic particles by coupling subluminal drivers with plasma density tapering.

Theoretical models and particle-in-cell simulations demonstrate the sustained acceleration of of particles orders of magnitude heavier than electrons with still maintaining high capture (reaching 100% in the optimal beam-loading regime) and preservation of transverse emittance. Another viable …

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CIRCUMVENTING DEPHASING AND PUMP-DEPLETION FOR LONG AND STABLE SINGLE-STAGE PLASMA ACCELERATION: from flying-focus laser pulses to proton-bunch drivers