The proposed interferometric-type laser-driven particle accelerators

In a crossed-laser-beam accelerator, two properly phased laser beams, forming an interferometric configuration, may provide an adequate particle acceleration field over a phase matching distance. The two laser beams can be obtained by dividing a full, Gaussian laser beam equally in amplitude or in wavefront. We show in this paper that a wavefront-splitting laser-driven accelerator is relatively simple to set up and provides an acceleration gain comparable to that of an amplitude-splitting accelerator under the same laser damage fluence. We also present the noise characteristics measured from various interferometers, which may be useful for implementing interferometric-type accelerators. copyright 1999 American Institute of Physics