Abstract

The conditions are elaborated how electrons can be accelerated by a travelling plane electromagnetic wave field in vacuum^[1]. It is shown that an effective acceleration is only possible in one half-wavelength of the field. This halfwave effect is investigated by taking the radial motion of the electrons into account in areas of varying field intensities. By choosing the focusing conditions for the beam, it is possible to obtain a maximal electron energy of where P is the laser power. Therefore, electrons can be accelerated by 10 PW laser pulses to energies of GeV. This effect can be experimentally proved with pulses of an actual neodymium glass laser of 20 TW with 1.2 psec duration^[2], where a maximal electron energy of 40 MeV is expected. Chemical lasers with 100 PW pulses^[3] will show the way to even higher electron energies. Hence TeV electron accelerators with high luminosity should be possible in future.

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