Photonic device particle accelerators and light sources

摘要

Laser-driven particle acceleration is revealing itself as a very promising future alternative to RF particle acceleration. The concept of this acceleration technology is to employ a photonic structure that controls an electromagnetic wave in such a way as to produce a continuous acceleration force along the electron beam trajectory. The electrons travel in a vacuum space, which eliminates scattering from matter and degradation of the particle beam. In contrast to RF accelerators the wavelength of the accelerating field is reduced by almost 5 orders of magnitude to the visible or near infrared, which is readily available from efficient tabletop lasers and allows the use of dielectric materials that can sustain peak electric fields of 10{sup}10 V/m from 100 fsec near-infrared laser pulses. We have carried out a proof-of-principle experiment that demonstrates laser driven particle acceleration in an unambiguous fashion and verifies the relevant physics aspects [1]. Following this milestone we have explored various dielectric accelerator architectures and found a very simple grating-based geometry that is suitable for sub-100 fsec laser pulses and can be powered by a free space plane wave [2]. Time-domain electromagnetic simulations suggest that the optical phase of the field with respect to the particle beam determines whether the structure functions as an accelerator or as a deflection device.