Generation of stable and low-divergence 10-MeV quasimonoenergetic electron bunch using argon gas jet

Abstract

The pointing stability and divergence of a quasimonoenergetic electron bunch generated in a self-injected laser-plasma acceleration regime using 4 TW laser is studied. A pointing stability of 2.4 mrad root-mean-square (rms) and a beam divergence of 10.6 mrad (rms) were obtained using an argon gas-jet target for 50 sequential shots, while these values were degraded by a factor of 3 at the optimum condition using helium. The peak electron energies were $8.5\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.7$ and $24.8\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}3.6\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{MeV}$ using argon and helium, respectively. The experimental results indicate that the different propagation condition could be generated with the different material, although it is performed with the same irradiation condition.