Electron acceleration by a bichromatic chirped laser pulse in underdense plasmas

• Laser driven plasma based electron acceleration has been studied within the confines of an effective theory.
• The effects of mixing the main harmonic of a 800 nm wavelength IR laser with its second harmonic has been studied.
• Simulations have been carried out for plane wave and Gaussian driver pulses.
• Using bichromatic lasers, a single electron can gain 4% more energy using plane wave pulse and even 30% more energy, using Gaussian driver pulse than using a monochromatic pulse with the same intensity and pulse duration.

A theoretical study of laser and plasma based electron acceleration is presented. An effective model has been used, in which the presence of an underdense plasma has been taken account via its index of refraction nmnm. In the confines of this model, the basic phenomena can be studied by numerically solving the classical relativistic equations of motion. The key idea of this paper is the application of chirped, bichromatic laser fields. We investigated the advantages and disadvantages of mixing the second harmonic to the original λ=800nm wavelength pulse. We performed calculations both for plane wave and Gaussian pulses.