Laser Acceleration in Vacuum and Gases with Capillary Waveguide

A unified framework is developed to overcome all three major limitations on acceleration and distance and hence on the feasibility of two classes of laser acceleration. The three limitations are due to laser diffraction, acceleration phase slippage, and structure damage by high power laser if solid-state optical waveguide is used. The two classes of laser acceleration are direct-field acceleration and ponderomotive-driven acceleration. Thus this letter and its companion [1] provide solutions that are crucial to all mainstream approaches for laser acceleration, either in vacuum, gases or plasmas