Developing a diagnostic for energetic laser-Compton produced photon beams

This paper describes the design and simulation of a radiation detector system for diagnostic measurements of photon beams produced by Thomson or Compton Scattering. The photon beam is Compton scattered in a thin passive converter, and the resulting electrons are analyzed using a charge-coupled device-based tracker and classification algorithms. The flux of the scattered electrons is much lower than that of the photon beam and is additionally dispersed. This dispersal enables measurements while avoiding pileup, which is important in order to provide diagnostic information from intense 'shot' based pulsed systems, such as those being built to leverage laser wakefield accelerators. Simulations indicate that the designed system is capable of resolving beam parameters from a single shot. The fidelity to which various beam parameters can be resolved is presented as are methods that could result in further improvement to diagnostic resolution.