A compact tunable polarized X-ray source based on laser-plasma helical undulators.

ABSTRACT: Laser wakefield accelerators have great potential as the basis for next generation compact radiation sources because of their extremely high accelerating gradients. However, X-ray radiation from such devices still lacks tunability, especially of the intensity and polarization distributions. Here we propose a tunable polarized radiation source based on a helical plasma undulator in a plasma channel guided wakefield accelerator. When a laser pulse is initially incident with a skew angle relative to the channel axis, the laser and accelerated electrons experience collective spiral motions, which leads to elliptically polarized synchrotron-like radiation with flexible tunability on radiation intensity, spectra and polarization. We demonstrate that a radiation source with millimeter size and pe

SUBMITTER: Luo J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4932604 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature