A high power two-frequency laser can be used to modulate the axial momentum of a copropagating relativistic electron beam. The net work done on each electron is accounted for almost entirely by the axial electric field of the laser even when approaching the one-dimensional limit. After interacting with the laser, the electron beam can be bunched either by a long drift space or a dispersive opti...

Many competing linear instabilities are likely to occur in astrophysical settings, and it is important to assess which one grows faster for a given situation. An analytical model including the main beam plasma instabilities is developed. The full 3D dielectric tensor is thus explained for a cold relativistic electron beam passing through a cold plasma, accounting for a guiding magnetic field, a...

We describe the apparatus used to measure the spectrum of accelerated electrons from a laser-plasma acceleration experiment carried out at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (RAL). The source of the broadband, energetic electrons was the forward Raman scattering instability of a high intensity (5 × 10 W/cm) laser. Here the laser beam photons decay into scattered photons and a relativistic electro...

Populations of relativistic electrons in clusters of galaxies should imprint a characteristic spectral distortion signature on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons – the relativistic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect. We investigate how sensitive PLANCK and successor experiments will be in detecting or constraining the total optical depth τrel of relativistic electrons. We find an expected...

The relativistic self-focusing of an intense laser pulse (I 4x 10 TM W/cm 2, ~, = lktm, x = 400 fs) in a gas jet 750 ~tm in length was observed using sidescattering imaging. A self-modulated laser wakefield was generated to accelerate self-trapped electrons. The energy distribution and transverse emittanee of the electron beam changed due to the onset of the relativistic self-guiding.

SimTrack is a compact c++ library of 6-d symplectic element-by-element particle tracking in accelerators originally designed for head-on beam-beam compensation simulation studies in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It provides a 6-d symplectic orbit tracking with the 4th order symplectic integration for magnet elements and the 6-d symplectic synchro-...

It is now well established that laser plasma acceleration (LPA) is an innovative and good candidate in the beam acceleration field. Relativistic beams are indeed produced up to several GeV but their quality remains to be demonstrated in the highly demanding case of free-electron lasers (FELs). Several experiments have already shown the feasibility of synchrotron radiation delivery based on LPA ...

Interaction of an intense electromagnetic (em) beam with a relativistic electron-positron (e-p) plasma is investigated. It is shown that the thermal pressure brings about a fundamental change in the dynamics-localized, high amplitude, em field structures, not accessible to a cold (but relativistic) plasma, can now be formed under well-defined conditions. The possibilities of trapping em beams i...

We study the bound-free electron-positron pair production in relativistic heavy ion collisions to different bound states in a full Plane Wave Born Approximation (PWBA) calculation. Exact Dirac wave functions are used for both the bound electron and the free positron in the final states. Results for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC as well as the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) a...