Laser–capillary interaction for the EXIN project

Abstract The EXIN project is under development within the SPARC_LAB facility of the National Laboratory of Frascati (LNF-INFN). This project aims to accelerate pre-existing electron bunches with high brightness by exploiting the wakefield plasma acceleration technique, while preserving the initial brightness. The wakefield is excited inside a dielectric capillary by high intensity laser pulses produced by the FLAME laser interacting with a gas. In this work, we present numerical simulations in order to optimize energy coupling between our laser with super-Gaussian transverse profile and a dielectric capillary. Moreover, an overview of the experimental layout will be given.