# Alexander Debus's research while affiliated with Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and other places

## Publications (80)

Preprint
We present experimental results on a plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA) driven by high-current electron beams from a laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA). In this staged setup stable and high quality (low divergence and low energy spread) electron beams are generated at an optically-generated hydrodynamic shock in the PWFA. The energy stability of t...
Preprint
Free-electron lasers generate high-brilliance coherent radiation at wavelengths spanning from the infrared to the X-ray domains. The recent development of short-wavelength seeded free-electron lasers now allows for unprecedented levels of control on longitudinal coherence[1], opening new scientific avenues as ultra-fast dynamics on complex systems...
Article
Due to the recent announcement of the Frontier supercomputer, many scientific application developers are working to make their applications compatible with AMD (CPU-GPU) architectures, which means moving away from the traditional CPU and NVIDIA-GPU systems. Due to the current limitations of profiling tools for AMD GPUs, this shift leaves a void in...
Chapter
It is common in the HPC community that the achieved performance with just CPUs is limited for many computational cases. The EuroHPC pre-exascale and the coming exascale systems are mainly focused on accelerators, and some of the largest upcoming supercomputers such as LUMI and Frontier will be powered by AMD Instinct™ accelerators. However, these n...
Preprint
Full-text available
HPC systems employ a growing variety of compute accelerators with different architectures and from different vendors. Large scientific applications are required to run efficiently across these systems but need to retain a single code-base in order to not stifle development. Directive-based offloading programming models set out to provide the requir...
Preprint
Full-text available
Due to the recent announcement of the Frontier supercomputer, many scientific application developers are working to make their applications compatible with AMD architectures (CPU-GPU), which means moving away from the traditional CPU and NVIDIA-GPU systems. Due to the current limitations of profiling tools for AMD GPUs, this shift leaves a void in...
Article
Full-text available
We present the experimental demonstration of density downramp injection at a gas-dynamic shock in a beam-driven plasma accelerator. The ultrashort driver electron beam with a peak-current exceeding 10 kA allows operation in the blowout regime and enables injection of electron witness bunches at gentle density ramps, i.e., longer than the plasma wav...
Article
Full-text available
Matched beam loading in laser wakefield acceleration, characterizing the state of flattening the accelerating electric field along the bunch, leads to the minimization of energy spread at high-bunch charges. Here, we experimentally demonstrate by independently controlling injected charge and accelerating gradients, using the self-truncated ionizati...
Article
Full-text available
We consider the scattering of an x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) beam on the superposition of a strong magnetic field Bext with the Coulomb field Eext of a nucleus with charge number Z. In contrast to Delbrück scattering (Coulomb field only), the magnetic field Bext introduces an asymmetry (i.e., polarization dependence) and renders the effective...
Preprint
In this work we propose a deep neural network based surrogate model for a plasma shadowgraph - a technique for visualization of perturbations in a transparent medium. We are substituting the numerical code by a computationally cheaper projection based surrogate model that is able to approximate the electric fields at a given time without computing...
Preprint
Invertible neural networks are a recent technique in machine learning promising neural network architectures that can be run in forward and reverse mode. In this paper, we will be introducing invertible surrogate models that approximate complex forward simulation of the physics involved in laser plasma accelerators: iLWFA. The bijective design of t...
Article
Full-text available
Plasma wakefield accelerators are capable of sustaining gigavolt-per-centimeter accelerating fields, surpassing the electric breakdown threshold in state-of-the-art accelerator modules by 3-4 orders of magnitude. Beam-driven wakefields offer particularly attractive conditions for the generation and acceleration of high-quality beams. However, this...
Preprint
We present design and realization of an ultra-broadband optical spectrometer capable of measuring the spectral intensity of multi-octave-spanning light sources on a single-pulse basis with a dynamic range of up to 8 orders of magnitude. The instrument is optimized for the characterization of the temporal structure of femtosecond long electron bunch...
Article
Full-text available
Plasma-based accelerators use the strong electromagnetic fields that can be supported by plasmas to accelerate charged particles to high energies. Accelerating field structures in plasma can be generated by powerful laser pulses or charged particle beams. This research field has recently transitioned from involving a few small-scale efforts to the...
Chapter
Solving partial differential equations (PDE) is an indispensable part of many branches of science as many processes can be modelled in terms of PDEs. However, recent numerical solvers require manual discretization of the underlying equation as well as sophisticated, tailored code for distributed computing. Scanning the parameters of the underlying...
Preprint
Full-text available
We consider the scattering of an x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) beam on the superposition of a strong magnetic field $\bf{B}_{\rm ext}$ with the Coulomb field $\bf{E}_{\rm ext}$ of a nucleus with charge number $Z$. In contrast to pure Delbr\"uck scattering (Coulomb field only), the magnetic field $\bf{B}_{\rm ext}$ introduces an asymmetry (i.e.,...
Preprint
Solving partial differential equations (PDE) is an indispensable part of many branches of science as many processes can be modelled in terms of PDEs. However, recent numerical solvers require manual discretization of the underlying equation as well as sophisticated, tailored code for distributed computing. Scanning the parameters of the underlying...
Article
Full-text available
We report observations of coherent optical transition radiation interferometry (COTRI) patterns generated by microbunched ∼200−MeV electrons as they emerge from a laser-driven plasma accelerator. The divergence of the microbunched portion of electrons, deduced by comparison to a COTRI model, is ∼9× smaller than the ∼3 mrad ensemble beam divergence,...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Three kernels, Current Deposition (also known as Compute Current), Particle Push (Move and Mark), and Shift Particles are known to be some of the most time-consuming kernels in PIConGPU. The Current Deposition kernel and Particle Push kernel both set up the particle attributes for running any physics simulation with PIConGPU, so it is crucial to im...
Preprint
Full-text available
We present experimental measurements of the femtosecond time-scale generation of strong magnetic-field fluctuations during the interaction of ultrashort, moderately relativistic laser pulses with solid targets. These fields were probed using low-emittance, highly relativistic electron bunches from a laser wakefield accelerator, and a line-integrate...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This is a technical report that summarizes findings on the analysis of PIConGPU's three most intensive kernels by using NVProf Profiler tool and Summit system at the Oak Ridge National Lab (ORML). The kernels, Current Deposition (also known as Compute Current), Particle Push (Move and Mark), and Shift Particles are known to be some of the biggest k...
Article
Full-text available
Thomson scattering sources with their hard x-ray pencil beams represent a promising candidate to drive high-resolution X-ray Fluorescence Imaging (XFI). As XFI is a scanning imaging modality, it specifically requires pencil-beam geometries along with a high beam mobility. In combination with laser-wakefield acceleration (LWFA) such sources could pr...
Preprint
Full-text available
Plasma wakefield accelerators are capable of sustaining gigavolt-per-centimeter accelerating fields, surpassing the electric breakdown threshold in state-of-the-art accelerator modules by 3-4 orders of magnitude. Beam-driven wakefields offer particularly attractive conditions for the generation and acceleration of high-quality beams. However, this...
Article
Full-text available
Compact electron accelerators are paramount to next-generation synchrotron light sources and free-electron lasers, as well as for advanced accelerators at the TeV energy frontier. Recent progress in laser-plasma driven accelerators (LPA) has extended their electron energies to the multi-GeV range and improved beam stability for insertion devices. H...
Preprint
Full-text available
We report observations of coherent optical transition radiation interferometry (COTRI) patterns generated by microbunched ~200-MeV electrons as they emerge from a laser-plasma accelerator. The divergence of the microbunched portion of electrons, deduced by comparison to an analytical COTRI model, is ~6x smaller than the ~3 mrad ensemble beam diverg...
Article
Full-text available
We examine the experimental requirements for realizing a high-gain quantum free-electron laser (QFEL). Beyond fundamental constraints on electron beam and undulator, we discuss optimized interaction geometries, include coherence properties along with the impact of diffraction, space-charge and spontaneous emission. Based on desired QFEL properties,...
Preprint
Full-text available
Matched beam loading in laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA), characterizing the state of flattening of the acceleration electric field along the bunch, leads to the minimization of energy spread at high bunch charges. Here, we demonstrate by independently controlling injected charge and acceleration gradients, using the self-truncated ionization in...
Article
Full-text available
Plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) is a novel acceleration technique with promising prospects for both particle colliders and light sources. However, PWFA research has so far been limited to a few large-scale accelerator facilities worldwide. Here, we present first results on plasma wakefield generation using electron beams accelerated with a 100...
Preprint
We present a conceptual design for a hybrid laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerator (LWFA) to beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA). In this set-up, the output beams from an LWFA stage are used as input beams of a new PWFA stage. In the PWFA stage, a new witness beam of largely increased quality can be produced and accelerated to higher...
Article
Full-text available
We show how optical free-electron lasers and enhanced incoherent Thomson scattering radiation sources can be realized with Traveling-Wave Thomson-Scattering (TWTS) today. Emphasis is put on the realization of optical free-electron lasers (OFELs) with existing state-of-the-art technology for laser systems and electron accelerators. The conceptual de...
Preprint
Full-text available
We report initial observations of coherent optical transition radiation interferometry (COTRI) patterns generated by microbunched electrons from laser-driven plasma accelerators (LPAs). These are revealed in the angular distribution patterns obtained by a CCD camera with the optics focused at infinity, or the far-field, viewing a Wartski two-foil i...
Preprint
Plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) is a novel acceleration technique with promising prospects for both particle colliders and light sources. However, PWFA research has so far been limited to a few large-scale accelerator facilities world-wide. Here, we present first results on plasma wakefield generation using electron beams accelerated with a 10...
Preprint
We examine the experimental requirements for realizing a high-gain Quantum free-electron laser (Quantum FEL). Beyond fundamental constraints on electron beam and undulator, we discuss optimized interaction geometries, include coherence properties along with the impact of diffraction, space-charge and spontaneous emission. Based on desired Quantum F...
Article
Full-text available
Plasma-based accelerators that impart energy gain as high as several GeV to electrons or positrons within a few centimeters have engendered a new class of diagnostic techniques very different from those used in connection with conventional radio-frequency (rf) accelerators. The need for new diagnostics stems from the micrometer scale and transient,...
Article
We report on tailoring ionization-induced injection in laser wakefield acceleration so that the electron injection process is self-truncating following the evolution of the plasma bubble. Robust generation of high-quality electron beams with shot-to-shot fluctuations of the beam parameters better than 10% is presented in detail. As a novelty, the s...
Article
Full-text available
Quantitative predictions from synthetic radiation diagnostics often have to consider all accelerated particles. For particle-in-cell (PIC) codes, this not only means including all macro-particles but also taking into account the discrete electron distribution associated with them. This paper presents a general form factor formalism that allows to d...
Article
Full-text available
Interaction of relativistic electron beams with high power lasers can both serve as a secondary light source and as a novel diagnostic tool for various beam parameters. For both applications, it is important to understand the dynamics of the inverse Compton scattering mechanism and the dependence of the scattered light's spectral properties on the...
Article
Full-text available
Laser-plasma wakefield accelerators have seen tremendous progress, now capable of producing quasi-monoenergetic electron beams in the GeV energy range with few-femtoseconds bunch duration. Scaling these accelerators to the nanocoulomb range would yield hundreds of kiloamperes peak current and stimulate the next generation of radiation sources cover...
Article
For the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI), which occurs at shear interfaces between two plasma streams, we report results on the polarized radiation over all observation directions and frequencies emitted by the plasma electrons from ab initio kinetic simulations. We find the polarization of the radiation to provide a clear signature...
Article
Full-text available
We report on first commissioning results of the DRACO Petawatt ultra-short pulse laser system implemented at the ELBE center for high power radiation sources of Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. Key parameters of the laser system essential for efficient and reproducible performance of plasma accelerators are presented and discussed with the dem...
Conference Paper
The injection process of electrons into the plasma cavity in laser-wakefield accelerators is a nonlinear process that strongly influences the property of the accelerated electrons. During the acceleration electrons perform transverse (betatron) oscillations around the axis. This results in the emission of hard x-ray radiation (betatron radiation) w...
Code
PIConGPU is a fully relativistic, many GPGPU, 3D3V particle-in-cell (PIC) code. The Particle-in-Cell algorithm is a central tool in plasma physics. It describes the dynamics of a plasma by computing the motion of electrons and ions in the plasma based on Maxwell’s equations. This release of PIConGPU, providing ”beta” status for users, implements fu...
Conference Paper
We demonstrate that optical free-electron lasers (OFELs) realized with Traveling-Wave Thomson-Scattering (TWTS) are by orders of magnitude more efficient and brilliant than corresponding OFELs utilizing head-on Thomson scattering geometries. In addition, we emphasize that TWTS OFELs as opposed to standard head-on Thomson scattering geometries scale...
Data
This releases fixes a potential deadlock encountered during checkpoints and initialization. Furthermore, we forgot to highlight that the 0.2.0 release also included a QED synchrotron emission scheme (based on the review in A. Gonoskov et al., PRE 92, 2015). Please refer to our CHANGELOG.md for a full list of features, fixes and user interface chang...
Article
Full-text available
We present a fully analytic model of an all-optical free electron laser (OFEL) undulator based on the Traveling-Wave Thomson-Scattering (TWTS) scheme. The TWTS undulator provides for sub-mm undulator wavelengths, does not require any material or plasma to generate or contain the undulator field and allows for sub-meter saturation lengths. Starting...
Conference Paper
A measurement of laser Thomson-backscattering X-ray spectra recorded as a function of the observation angle and quantitatively reproduced in simulations is presented. A traveling wave scheme is proposed that increases the yield and may allow for all-optical free-electron laser operation.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We present a self-consistent method to compute angularly resolved far-field spectra for both coherent and incoherent radiation which enables unprecedented quantitative predictions by taking into account emissions from all ∼10^10 electrons simulated in PIC codes for hundreds to thousands of directions and frequencies. This is applied to predicting t...
Article
A Reply to the Comment by C. Thaury et al.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We present a particle-in-cell simulation of the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI) that for the first time delivers angularly resolved radiation spectra of the particle dynamics during the formation of the KHI. This enables studying the formation of the KHI with unprecedented spatial, angular and spectral resolution. Our results are of...
Article
Thomson backscattering of intense laser pulses from relativistic electrons not only allows for the generation of bright x-ray pulses but also for the investigation of the complex particle dynamics at the interaction point. For this purpose a complete spectral characterization of a Thomson source powered by a compact linear electron accelerator is p...
Article
a b s t r a c t A tunable source of intense ultra-short hard X-ray pulses represents a novel tool for the structural anal-ysis of complex systems with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution. With the simultaneous availability of a high power short-pulse laser system this provides unique opportunities at the forefront of relativistic light–ma...
Article
The particle-in-cell code PIConGPU provides the feature of calculating angular resolved radiation spectra in the far field based on Liénard─Wiechert potentials for all macroparticles of a plasma simulation. In order to verify the physics of our code we present a series of physics test scenarios, which compare numerical results to analytic solutions...
Article
We show that X-ray optical free-electron lasers (OFELs) can be realized using Traveling-Wave Thomson-Scattering (TWTS). In TWTS pulse front tilted laser pulses are scattered off relativistic electron bunches in a side-scattering geometry. The pulse-front tilt guarantees overlap between laser and electrons over distances in the meter range while bot...