Vacuum laser acceleration of super-ponderomotive electrons using relativistic transparency injection

Intense lasers can accelerate electrons to very high energy over a short distance. Such compact accelerators have several potential applications including fast ignition, high energy physics, and radiography. Among the various schemes of laser-based electron acceleration, vacuum laser acceleration has the merits of super-high acceleration gradient and great simplicity. Yet its realization has been difficult because injecting free electrons into the fast-oscillating laser field is not trivial. Here we demonstrate free-electron injection and subsequent vacuum laser acceleration of electrons up to 20 MeV using the relativistic transparency effect. When a high-contrast intense laser drives a thin solid foil, electrons from the dense opaque plasma are first accelerated to near-light speed by the standing laser wave in front of the solid foil and subsequently injected into the transmitted laser field as the opaque plasma becomes relativistically transparent. It is possible to further optimize the electron injection/acceleration by manipulating the laser polarization, incident angle, and temporal pulse shaping. Our result also sheds light on the fundamental relativistic transparency process, crucial for producing secondary particle and light sources.

Efficient Organic and Inorganic Hybrid Interlayer for High Performance Inverted Red Cadmium-free Quantum Dot Light-Emitting Diodes

The efficiency and device lifetime of quantum dot light-emitting diodes (QLEDs) devices suffer due to charge unbalance issue resulting from excess electron injection from ZnO electron transport layer (ETL) to...

Consideration of contribution of hot-electron injection to the resistive switching of sputter-deposited silicon oxide film

<p>This paper considers the contribution of hot electrons to the resistive switching of sputter-deposited silicon oxide films based on experiments together with semi-2D Monte Carlo simulations. Using various device stack structures, this paper examines the impact of hot-electron injection on resistive switching, where conduction-band offset and fermi-level difference are utilized. Support is found for the predictions that hot-electron injection reduces the switching voltage and this should reduce the dissipation energy of switching. It is predicted that two-layer metal stacks can significantly reduce the number of oxygen vacancies in the sputter-deposited silicon oxide film after the reset process. It is also demonstrated that, in unipolar switching, the number of E’ or E” centers of the sputter-deposited silicon oxide film is relatively large.</p>