First staging of two laser accelerators

Staging of two laser-driven, relativistic electron accelerators has been demonstrated for the first time in a proof-of-principle experiment, whereby two distinct and serial laser accelerators acted on an electron beam in a coherently cumulative manner. Output from a CO2 laser was split into two beams to drive two inverse free electron lasers (IFEL) separated by 2.3 m. The first IFEL served to bunch the electrons into similar to3 fs microbunches, which were rephased with the laser wave in the second IFEL. This represents a crucial step towards the development of practical laser-driven electron accelerators.