Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Spectrum Broadening in Non-linear Compton Sources from Electron Beam Distribution

Student: Cody Reeves

School: University of Florida

Mentored By: Balša Terzić and Geoffrey Krafft

Demand for sources of high intensity x-ray pulses has surged in recent years for applications spanning from tomography to radiological imaging. For stronger Compton sources, there exists a ponderomotive broadening as the field slows the electron during the duration of the incident laser pulse. Recent work has been conducted to calculate the exact frequency modulation (FM) required to counteract this broadening. While that study was applied to scattering from a single electron, this work focuses on applying the exact FM onto distributions of electron energy, as would be used in real world applications. The work shows that peak height and width are approximately the same for beam energy spreads less than 1%, as in the single electron case. These results prove even more consequential due to the proposals to build the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) facilities in Eastern Europe that employ Compton backscattering to produce high intensity gamma beams.