Coherent Optical Signatures of Electron Microbunching in Laser-Driven Plasma Accelerators

Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Jul 3;125(1):014801. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.014801.

Abstract

We report observations of coherent optical transition radiation interferometry (COTRI) patterns generated by microbunched ∼200-MeV electrons as they emerge from a laser-driven plasma accelerator. The divergence of the microbunched portion of electrons, deduced by comparison to a COTRI model, is ∼9× smaller than the ∼3 mrad ensemble beam divergence, while the radius of the microbunched beam, obtained from COTR images on the same shot, is <3 μm. The combined results show that the microbunched distribution has estimated transverse normalized emittance ∼0.4 mm mrad.