Ultrashort electron beam generation from resonantly excited nonlinear laser wakefield

A method for generating an ultrashort electron beam from a resonantly excit ed nonlinear wake field is proposed using a short laser pulse with a relati vistic intensity. The considerable amount of electrons up to 10 C/m(2) are extracted from an appropriate thin plasma layer. When the laser intensity i s highly relativistic, the electron beam is singly bunched and has a pulse length less than the laser wavelength and a large energy spread with a maxi mum energy of tens of MeV. [S1063-651X(99)11901-9].