Giga Electron Volt Scale High-Repetition-Rate Plasma Accelerator
Abstract
As first shown by the PI and the Lawrence-Berkeley (LBNL) group,1 laser-driven plasma accelerators can generate electron beams with particle energies in the GeV range.1–3 This energy is comparable to that used in 3rd and 4th generation light sources, i.e. synchrotrons and free-electron lasers (FELs) — but in a laser-plasma accelerator the accelerator stage is only a few centimetres long, compared with the few hundred metres required by a conventional radio-frequency (RF) machine. Laser-plasma accelerators are ideal for driving X- and gamma-ray sources via magnetic undulators,4 betatron oscillations, 5,6 and Thomson- or Compton-scattering.7–9 The bright, highly collimated beams generated this way have several applications,10 including in medical science. So far the radiation generated from laser-accelerated electrons has been incoherent. It is eagerly anticipated that plasma accelerators could drive FELs, providing coherent(“laser-like”) X-radiation ten orders of magnitude brighter than these incoherent sources. Only a handful of X-ray FELs (XFELs) exist today, driven by km-scale conventional accelerators,11 but despite their scarcity XFELs have completely transformed many areas of ultrafast science. However, the high cost of conventional X-ray facilities (of order 100M for synchrotrons and e1 billion for an XFEL) and large scale (up to several kilometres for XFELs) severely limits their number; this necessarily restricts the amount, but also the type, of research
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 19, 2018
- Source ID
- FA95501817005
Entities
People
- Simon M. Hooker
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- United States Air Force
- University of Oxford