Plasma accelerators race to 10 GeV and beyond

摘要

This paper reviews the concepts, recent history, and current challenges for realizing ultracompact particle accelerators based on surfing on plasma waves. Ideas that seemed fanciful when first proposed by John Dawson in the late 1970s have now come to fruition as a result of the development of ultrashort high-power laser and particle beam drivers, tunnel-ionized plasma sources, and one-to-one particle simulation capability. Breakthroughs in the past 2 years have dramatically advanced the field. Laser-driven gas jets now produce 100 MeV beams of electrons that are monoenergetic and that have transverse beam quality and brightness exceeding that in conventional accelerators. Electron-beam driven plasma waves driven by the 28 GeV electron beam of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have been used to accelerate electrons in the tail of the beam by more than 10 GeV in less than 30 cm. The prospects for extending both of these schemes to the energy frontier (currently 50 GeV) and beyond are discussed. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.