%0 Journal Article %T Effect of experimental laser imperfections on laser wakefield acceleration and betatron source %+ DAM Île-de-France (DAM/DIF) %+ Laboratoire d'optique appliquée (LOA) %+ Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications - INRS (EMT-INRS) %A Ferri, J %A Davoine, X %A Fourmaux, S %A Kieffer, J C %A Corde, Sébastien %A Ta Phuoc, Kim %A Lifschitz, Agustin %< avec comité de lecture %@ 2045-2322 %J Scientific Reports %I Nature Publishing Group %V 6 %P 27846 %8 2016 %D 2016 %R 10.1038/srep27846 %Z Physics [physics]/Physics [physics]/Plasma Physics [physics.plasm-ph]Journal articles %X Laser pulses in current ultra-short TW systems are far from being ideal Gaussian beams. The influence of the presence of non-Gaussian features of the laser pulse is investigated here from experiments and 3D Particle-in-Cell simulations. Both the experimental intensity distribution and wavefront are used as input in the simulations. It is shown that a quantitative agreement between experimental data and simulations requires to use realistic pulse features. Moreover, some trends found in the experiments, such as the growing of the X-ray signal with the plasma length, can only be retrieved in simulations with realistic pulses. The performances on the electron acceleration and the synchrotron X-ray emission are strongly degraded by these non-Gaussian features, even keeping constant the total laser energy. A drop on the X-ray photon number by one order of magnitude was found. This clearly put forward the limitation of using a Gaussian beam in the simulations. %G English %2 https://polytechnique.hal.science/hal-01337403/document %2 https://polytechnique.hal.science/hal-01337403/file/2016_Ferri_SciRep.pdf %L hal-01337403 %U https://polytechnique.hal.science/hal-01337403 %~ CEA %~ X %~ ENSTA %~ CNRS %~ X-LOA %~ X-DEP %~ X-DEP-PHYS %~ ENSTA_LOA %~ DAM %~ UNIV-PARIS-SACLAY %~ X-SACLAY %~ ENSTA-SACLAY