Transverse Confinement in Cascaded Inverse-Cherenkov Acceleration via Phase-Trajectory Control and Injection Matching

Abstract

Sub-relativistic electrons in micron-scale dielectric laser accelerators face coupled challenges of longitudinal dephasing and transverse defocusing, often imposing stringent requirements on injector emittance. Here, we demonstrate a combined strategy of phase-trajectory control and injection matching for sustained, confined acceleration. By coordinating the refractive-index and section-length sequences with the injected beam's Twiss parameters, we control accumulated phase slippage while maintaining transverse confinement. In a seven-section inverse-Cherenkov accelerator simulation, a 100-keV electron bunch with an initial normalized transverse emittance of 1 nm-rad and a relative kinetic-energy spread of 0.1% reaches 1154.7 keV over 1.545 mm, with a transverse rms beam size below 1 $μ$m throughout the accelerating channels. The exit normalized emittance is 1.92 nm-rad, and the relative RMS kinetic-energy spread is 0.6%, with no particle loss under the specified tracking-acceptance criterion. The results demonstrate that coordinated structural sequencing and injection matching can relax injector-emittance requirements by up to approximately two orders of magnitude, offering a route toward compact dielectric accelerators for ultrafast electron diffraction, microscopy, and chip-scale coherent radiation.