Proposed Waveguide Structure for Laser Driven Electron Acceleration

Solid state lasers have achieved high energy output with very short pulses (several Joules with pulses shorter than 1ps, peak power in the order of terawatts)[1]-[5]. Lithography and micro machining enables fabrication of features much less than 1μ m[13]-[17]. Combined with the fact that material damage threshold increases with shorter pulses[20][21], it is now possible to achieve electric field gradient on the order of GV/m inside a waveguide structure. This paper proposes a capacitor-loaded periodic waveguide structure for the acceleration of 5x108 electrons at 2.4kHz repetition rate with 0.56GeV/m acceleration gradient.