Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Laser wakefield acceleration experiments were carried out using hydrogen-filled capillary discharge waveguides. For a 33 mm long, 300 mu m capillary, parameter regimes with high energy electron beams (up to 1 GeV) and stable 0.5 GeV were found. In the high energy regime, the electron beam peak energy was correlated with the number of trapped electrons. For a 15 mm long, 200 mu m diameter capillary, quasi-monoenergetic e beams up to 300 MeV were observed. By de-tuning discharge delay from optimum guiding performance, self-trapping was found to be stabilized.