Quasi-monoenergetic and tunable X-rays from a laser-driven Compton light source

The maximum achievable photon energy of compact, conventional, Compton-scattering X-ray sources is currently limited by the maximum permissible field gradient of conventional electron accelerators. An alternative compact Compton X-ray source architecture with no such limitation is based instead on a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Nature photonics 2014-01, Vol.8 (1), p.28-31
Main Authors:	Powers, N D, Ghebregziabher, I, Golovin, G, Liu, C, Chen, S, Banerjee, S, Zhang, J, Umstadter, D P
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Accelerators Electron acceleration Electron accelerators Lasers Photons Scattering X-ray sources X-rays
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	The maximum achievable photon energy of compact, conventional, Compton-scattering X-ray sources is currently limited by the maximum permissible field gradient of conventional electron accelerators. An alternative compact Compton X-ray source architecture with no such limitation is based instead on a high-field-gradient laser-wakefield accelerator. In this case, a single high-power (100 TW) laser system generates intense laser pulses, which are used for both electron acceleration and scattering. Although such all-laser-based sources have been demonstrated to be bright and energetic in proof-of-principle experiments, to date they have lacked several important distinguishing characteristics of conventional Compton sources. We now report the experimental demonstration of all-laser-driven Compton X-rays that are both quasi-monoenergetic (∼50% full-width at half-maximum) and tunable (∼70 keV to >1 MeV). These performance improvements are highly beneficial for several important X-ray radiological applications.
ISSN:	1749-4885 1749-4893