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Plasma physics

On the crest of a wake

Nature volume 445, pages 721–722 (2007)Cite this article

What a conventional particle accelerator needs kilometres to achieve, a compact 'plasma wakefield' accelerator has just mastered in less than a metre. So is it adieu to the era of the gargantuan mega-accelerator?

On page 741 of this issue, Blumenfeld et al.1 take the exploitation of this wake effect to a new, higher-energy plane. They describe a technique for accelerating electrons in the wake of an ultra-relativistic electron beam propagating through an ionized gas (a plasma). Over a distance of less than a metre they succeed in doubling the energy of the electron beam at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC) in California — which reaches 42 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) only after passing 3 kilometres of conventional technology based on radio-frequency accelerator cavities.

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Figure 1: Turbulent history.

THE ROYAL COLLECTION © 2007, HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II

Figure 2: Strip and surf.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robert Bingham is at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot OX11 OQX, UK. r.bingham@rl.ac.uk,

    Robert Bingham

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  1. Robert Bingham
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Bingham, R. On the crest of a wake. Nature 445, 721–722 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/445721a

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