I Multi-GeV Electron Bunches from All-Optical Laser Wakefield Accelerator

[Astronuc]

Compact electron accelerator reaches new speeds with nothing but light​

https://phys.org/news/2022-09-compact-electron.html

A team at the University of Maryland (UMD) headed by Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering Howard Milchberg, in collaboration with the team of Jorge J. Rocca at Colorado State University (CSU), achieved this feat using two laser pulses sent through a jet of hydrogen gas. The first pulse tore apart the hydrogen, punching a hole through it and creating a channel of plasma. That channel guided a second, higher power pulse that scooped up electrons out of the plasma and dragged them along in its wake, accelerating them to nearly the speed of light in the process.

Multi-GeV Electron Bunches from an All-Optical Laser Wakefield Accelerator​

Abstract​

We present the first demonstration of multi-GeV laser wakefield acceleration in a fully optically formed plasma waveguide, with an acceleration gradient as high as 25  GeV/m.
https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.12.031038

 

[OscarCP]

This is really interesting. I have been reading, now and then, for almost two decades by now, about "tabletop wakefield particle accelerators", meaning small enough to fit on a tabletop, presumably one less than 1 km by 1 km, with this one perhaps being also of small size -- while this is the latest report on an wakefield accelerator I have come across in a while, just now, here.

It would be something of a revolution in experimental particle physics, with useful practical applications as well, if something like the device described in the article linked in this thread's opening comment on what some researchers are doing at UofMD, could be scaled up to produce beams of enough ultra-high energy particles to be used as an effective component, perhaps a starting stage, of a both powerful and smaller atom smasher than any equivalent ones of more conventional design these days. Or, who knows? Some day as the whole atom smasher all by itself.

I wish all the luck to the members of this group and any others elsewhere persevering on this kind of worthwhile and, at least until now, clearly long-term project.