High-energy X-ray radiography with apodized petawatt laser beams
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: We have produced laser wakefield-accelerated electron beams with energies of 2 GeV in Target Area 1 of the ZEUS facility. These electron beams oscillate in the accelerating structure that is produced in the wake of an ultrashort laser pulse (25 fs). These 'betatron' oscillations result in the emission of a collimated (4 mrad divergence) beam of high-energy X-ray/gamma photons (on the order of several hundred keV). In this work, we demonstrate the capabilities of the ZEUS laser system by showing that apodizing the laser beam in the near field allows for the production of high-quality betatron X-rays for radiography purposes. This demonstrates that a high-power, large-aperture laser beam could be split into multiple parts to drive betatron X-ray sources from multiple angles or temporal delays into a High Energy Density (HED) target to be probed, enabling pump-probe measurements at multiple temporal delays or tomography on a single shot.
Source: Optics Express
DOI: 10.1364/oe.575286
Authors: Tanner Nutting, Richard Anthony, Franko Bayer, Miloš Burger, Paul T. Campbell, Franklin Dollar, Nicholas P. Ernst, Rebecca Fitzgarrald, Victor Flores, Christopher Gardner, Bixue Hou, Igor Jovanovic, Galina Kalinchenko, Galina Kuranz, Joshua Lewis, William Likes, Yong Ma, Monica Mashkevich, John Nees, Gregg Sucha, Alexander G. R. Thomas, Joseph To, Richard Van Camp, Michael Wendt, Louise Willingale, Grant Young, Qing Zhang, Karl Krushelnick, Anatoly Maksimchuk
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,270
Awards: NONLINEAR PLASMA COMPRESSION FOR ULTRAINTENSE RELATIVISTIC LASER SCIENCE, Research Infrastructure: Midscale RI-1 (M1:DP): OMEGA-EP-Pumped Optical Parametric Amplifier Line (EP-OPAL) Facility Design, G5596625510, Mid-scale RI-1 (M1:IP): Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort Pulse Laser System (ZEUS), Extreme Ultraviolet Generation and Spectroscopy in Laser Wakefield Accelerators, NSF ZEUS Multi-Petawatt Laser Facility: Operations, Science and Technology Center on Real-Time Functional Imaging (STROBE)
OpenAlex ID: W4414970220