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Description
Laser-driven photon sources benefit from the inherently small source size and ultrashort duration, resulting in high brilliance beams. Different configurations based on laser-driven electron acceleration have been proposed so far in order to improve the laser-target energy coupling and obtain high energy and high photon flux sources. One method to enhance the number of radiating electrons is the usage of solid structured targets. The setup presented here consists of an intense laser pulse irradiating the narrow (submicron) side of a solid target, with length on the order of a few tens of microns, at normal incidence.
Using 3D simulations performed with the fully relativistic particle-in-cell code SMILEI [1], we describe the interaction between the laser pulse and the thin target when a plasma mirror is placed at the opposite end of the foil. Energetic electrons that are extracted from the target and accelerated longitudinally interact with the reflected laser pulse, resulting in a significantly increased number of high energy photons generated via the non-linear inverse Compton process.
Thanks to the high photon flux, small source size and ultra short duration of the laser pulse, very high values for the brilliance can be achieved, on the order of 10$^{23}$s$^{-1}$mm$^{-2}$mrad$^{-2}$0.1%BW$^{-1}$.
[1] J. Derouillat et al., SMILEI: a collaborative, open-source, multi-purpose particle-in-cell code for plasma simulation, Comput. Phys. Commun. 222, 351-373 (2018)
