Clean beams from laser wake-field accelerators via optical injection with a cleanup pulse

Multiple colliding-pulse injection schemes have been proposed as means for trapping electrons in the ultrashort acceleration buckets of laser-generated wake fields. The primary goal of this paper is to present a parameter study to determine the beams that can be obtained through collisions of collinear laser pulses in uniform plasma. The parameter study is through fully self-consistent, two-dimensional, particle-in-cell simulations, as previous work used only test-particle computations. To remove the multiple beams that can commonly be generated in colliding pulse injection, we use a cleanup pulse, a trailing laser pulse that absorbs the wake. The wake then no longer exists in the region where the trailing beamlets would be, and so the trailing beamlets no longer form. A series of simulations predicts that with such one can obtain single, short (⩽10fs) beams with a bunch charge of order 10pC, normalized emittance of order 2πμm, and energy spread of the order of 10%. The parameters of the beams are insensitive to the amplitude of the backward pulse above normalized amplitudes of abw≈0.4.