Speaker
Description
Gamma radiation sources resulting from laser-plasma interactions take advantage of their
small source size and ultrashort duration, therefore resulting in high brilliance. Different con-
figurations based on laser-driven electron acceleration have been proposed in order to enhance
laser-target energy coupling and obtain high energy and high photon flux sources, some of them
involving structured targets. The setup presented here is inspired by the "peeler" scheme, origi-
nally suggested for the generation of monochromatic ion bunches. It consists of an intense laser
pulse irradiating the narrow (submicron) side of a solid blade target, with length on the order of
a few dozen microns, at normal incidence.
This scheme has been shown to work well for 100TW-class lasers, where the target tip re-
mains reasonably intact and most of the photon generation is a result of electrons oscillating
as they propagate along the target surface. By using 3D simulations performed with the fully
relativistic particle-in-cell code SMILEI, we show that, at higher laser powers, a significant part
of the photon generation events occur close to the target tip, where the plasma is pinched and
electrons undergo accelerated motion in the laser electric field, thus emitting a large number
of synchrotron photons. The resulting brilliance of this source exceeds 1023 second−1 mm−2
mrad−2 0.1% BW−1 at 10 MeV
