Plasma guiding and Wakefield generation for second-generation experiments

A design study has been carried out for a second-generation experiment on laser guiding and wakefield excitation in a channel. From simple scaling laws for the wakefield amplitude, dephasing length, the relativistic group velocity factor gamma(g), and energy gain with and without guiding, we find that the parameter regime for a compact single stage GeV accelerator favors laser systems producing short pulses (10 fs less than or equal to tau less than or equal to 100 fs), each containing an energy on the order of 100 mJ to a few J's. Taking the dephasing length as the maximum acceleration distance, plasma channels with lengths of 1-10 cm and densities of 10(17)-10(19) cm(-3) need to be produced; whereas the design study has been primarily concerned with diffraction and channel guiding, dephasing and depletion limits, and linear wakefield theory, aspects of the effect of the plasma wave on the evolution of the laser pulse are discussed. We find that transverse and longitudinal pulse distortions could indeed affect the generated plasma wave phase velocity and amplitude, and hence may limit the achievable energy gains over the one-dimensional (1-D) linear estimates. Some issues for experiments on prototype small accelerators (100 MeV-1 GeV, cm scale) are also discussed.