Compact Polarized X-Ray Source Based on All-Optical Inverse Compton Scattering

Yue Ma, Jianfei Hua, Dexiang Liu, Yunxiao He, Tianliang Zhang, Jiucheng Chen, Fan Yang, Xiaonan Ning, Hongze Zhang, Yingchao Du, and Wei Lu

Phys. Rev. Applied 19, 014073 – Published 31 January 2023

Abstract

Polarized x-ray source is a useful probe for many fields, such as fluorescence imaging, magnetic microscopy, and nuclear physics research. All-optical inverse Compton scattering source (AOCS) based on a laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) has drawn great attention in recent years due to its compact scale and high performance, especially its potential to generate polarized x rays. Here, polarization-tunable AOCS x rays are generated by a plasma-mirror-based scheme. The linearly and circularly polarized AOCS x rays are measured to have the mean photon energy of $60 (\pm 5) / 64 (\pm 3)$ keV and the single-shot photon yield of approximately $1.1 / 1.3 \times 10^{7}$ . A Compton polarimeter is designed to diagnose the x-ray polarization states, demonstrating the polarization tunability of AOCS, and indicating that the average polarization degree of the linearly polarized AOCS is $75 (\pm 3) %$ within 18.2 mrad x-ray divergence.

Received 22 February 2022
Revised 19 October 2022
Accepted 15 December 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.19.014073

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Laser wakefield acceleration Polarization of light X-ray generation in plasmas

Optical sources & detectors

Compton scattering

Accelerators & BeamsPlasma PhysicsAtomic, Molecular & OpticalCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Yue Ma^1,2, Jianfei Hua ^1,*, Dexiang Liu ¹, Yunxiao He ¹, Tianliang Zhang¹, Jiucheng Chen¹, Fan Yang¹, Xiaonan Ning¹, Hongze Zhang¹, Yingchao Du¹, and Wei Lu^1,3,†

¹Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
²Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
³Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, Beijing 100193, China

^*jfhua@tsinghua.edu.cn
^†weilu@tsinghua.edu.cn

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Vol. 19, Iss. 1 — January 2023

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Images

Figure 1
Schematic layout of the experiment, where the filter set and the Compton polarimeter are both movable. (a) Laser energy of the $s$ - and $p$ -polarized components at different wave-plate angles, showing that the drive laser is linearly and circularly polarized at $0 / 45^{\circ}$ , and elliptically polarized between $0^{\circ}$ to $45^{\circ}$ . (b) The two-dimensional azimuthal distribution of the secondary Compton scattering photons detected by the imaging plate in the Compton polarimeter, where the red arrow shows the propagation direction of the incident AOCS x rays.
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Figure 2
The electron spectra driven by different polarized lasers. (a) Single-shot spectra for continuous 35-shot LWFA electron beams driven by different polarized lasers, where the wave-plate angle for each drive laser is labeled on the top. (b) 50-shot accumulated spectrum curves of the electron beams driven by the linearly and circularly polarized lasers, where the shaded areas around the curves are the FWHM errors. The detection threshold (40.3 MeV) is highlighted by a black solid line.
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Figure 3
The x-ray spectrum measurement results. (a) and (b) are the accumulated x-ray profiles of 50-shot linearly and circularly polarized AOCS pulses on the x-ray detector, while (c),(d) are those attenuated by the filter set. (e) is the structure of the filter set, where the yellow filters are made of copper and others are made of aluminum. The corresponding serial number and thickness are marked on each filter. (f) is the normalized x-ray intensities attenuated by the filter set. (g),(h) are the reconstructed spectra of the linearly and circularly polarized AOCS x rays, where the shaded areas around the two curves are the reconstruction errors.
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Figure 4
Monte Carlo simulation results of the polarization diagnosis using the Compton polarimeter. (a)–(f) are the two-dimensional azimuthal distributions of the secondary Compton photons, and the corresponding one-dimensional distributions are plotted in (g). In these simulations, (a)–(c) are performed using 100% linearly polarized incident x rays with different off-axis deviations (0 mm, 8 mm in the vertical direction, and 8 mm in the horizontal direction) between the x-ray path and the axis of the scattering target; (d) is performed using 50% linearly polarized incident x rays with 0-mm off-axis deviation; (e) and (f) are performed using 100% circularly polarized incident x rays with 0- and 8-mm off-axis deviations.
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Figure 5
Experiment results of the polarization diagnosis using the Compton polarimeter. (a),(b) are the two-dimensional azimuthal distributions of the secondary Compton photons for the linearly and circularly polarized AOCS x rays, and the corresponding one-dimensional distributions along with the simulated fitting curves are plotted in (c). The off-axis deviations of the linearly and circularly polarized fitting cases are marked in the legends.
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Figure 6
Monte Carlo simulation results about the effect of electron divergence on AOCS polarization. (a) and (b) are the two-dimensional polarization degree distributions of the linearly and circularly polarized AOCS at the experiment conditions, where the black dashed circles indicate the acceptance divergence of the Compton polarimeter. (c) is the average polarization degrees within different x-ray divergences of (a) and (b), where the pentacles on the curves indicate the acceptance divergence of the Compton polarimeter. (d) is the on-axis polarization degrees of the AOCS x-rays generated using the electron beams with different FWHM divergences.
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