Laser-based electron sources are attracting strong interest from the conventional accelerator community due to their unique characteristics in terms of high initial energy, low emittance, and significant beam current. Extremely strong electric fields (up to hundreds of $\mathrm{GV}/\mathrm{m}$) generated in the plasma allow accelerating gradients much higher than in conventional accelerators and set the basis for achieving very high final energies in a compact space. Generating laser-driven high-energy electron beam lines therefore represents an attractive challenge for novel particle accelerators. In this paper we show that laser-driven electrons generated by the nowadays consolidated TW laser systems, when leaving the interaction region, are subject to a very strong, normalized emittance worsening which makes them quickly unusable for any beam transport. Furthermore, due to their intrinsic beam characteristics, controlling and capturing the full beam current can only be achieved improving the source parameters.

In this Letter we report the first experiments aimed at the simultaneous demonstration of the emittance compensation process and velocity bunching in a high brightness electron source, the SPARC photoinjector in INFN-LNF. While a maximum compression ratio up to a factor 14 has been observed, in a particular case of interest a compression factor of 3, yielding a slice current of 120 A with less than $2\mu \mathrm{m}$ slice emittance, has been measured. This technique may be crucial in achieving high brightness beams in photoinjectors aiming at optimized performance of short wavelength single-pass free electron lasers or other advanced applications in laser-plasma accelerators.

Laser-driven electron beamlines are receiving increasing interest from the particle accelerator community. In particular, the high initial energy, low emittance, and high beam current of the plasma based electron source potentially allow generating much more compact and bright particle accelerators than what conventional accelerator technology can achieve. Using laser-generated particles as injectors for generating beamlines could significantly reduce the size and cost of accelerator facilities. Unfortunately, several features of laser-based particle beams need still to be improved before considering them for particle beamlines and thus enable the use of plasma-driven accelerators for the multiple applications of traditional accelerators. Besides working on the plasma source itself, a promising approach to shape the laser-generated beams is coupling them with conventional accelerator elements in order to benefit from both a versatile electron source and a controllable beam. In this paper, we perform start-to-end simulations to generate laser-driven beamlines using conventional accelerator codes and methodologies. Starting with laser-generated electrons that can be obtained with established multi-hundred TW laser systems, we compare different options to capture and transport the beams. This is performed with the aim of providing beamlines suitable for potential applications, such as free electron lasers. In our approach, we have analyzed which parameters are critical at the source and from there evaluated different ways to overcome these issues using conventional accelerator elements and methods. We show that electron driven beamlines are potentially feasible, but exploiting their full potential requires extensive improvement of the source parameters or innovative technological devices for their transport and capture.

In this Letter we report the first experimental observation of the double emittance minimum effect in the beam dynamics of high-brightness electron beam generation by photoinjectors; this effect, as predicted by the theory, is crucial in achieving minimum emittance in photoinjectors aiming at producing electron beams for short wavelength single-pass free electron lasers. The experiment described in this Letter was performed at the SPARC photoinjector site, during the first stage of commissioning of the SPARC project. The experiment was made possible by a newly conceived device, called an emittance meter, which allows a detailed and unprecedented study of the emittance compensation process as the beam propagates along the beam pipe.

The technological development in the field of high brightness linear accelerators and high energy/high quality lasers enables today designing high brilliance Compton-X and Gamma-photon beams suitable for a wide range of applications in the innovative field of nuclear photonics. The challenging requirements of this kind of source comprise: tunable energy (1–20 MeV), very narrow bandwidth (0.3%), and high spectral density (10⁴ photons/s/eV). We present here a study focused on the design and the optimization of an electron Linac aimed to meet the source specifications of the European Extreme Light Infrastructure—Nuclear Physics project, currently funded and seeking for an innovative machine design in order to outperform state-of-the-art facilities. We show that the phase space density of the electron beam, at the collision point against the laser pulse, is the main quality factor characterizing the Linac.