Compression and acceleration of electron bunches to high energies in the interference field of intense laser pulses with tilted amplitude fronts: concept and modelling

A new concept of accelerating electrons by laser radiation is proposed, namely, direct acceleration by a laser field under the conditions of interference of several relativistic-intensity laser pulses with amplitude fronts tilted by the angle 45° with respect to the phase fronts. Due to such interference the traps moving with the speed of light arise that capture the electrons, produced in the process of ionisation of low-density gas by the same laser radiation. The modelling on the basis of solving the relativistic Newton equation with the appropriate Lorenz force shows that these traps, moving in space, successively collect electrons from the target, compress the resulting electron ensemble in all directions up to the dimensions smaller than the wavelength of the laser radiation and accelerate it up to the energies of the order of a few GeV per electron.