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Wakefield accelerators

Plasma models get a boost

Nature Physics volume 6, pages 239–240 (2010)Cite this article

Laser-driven particle accelerators can accelerate electrons to energies in excess of 1 GeV over a distance of just a few centimetres. An innovative technique that drastically reduces the computational demands of simulating laser–plasma interactions should help increase this to tens of gigaelectronvolts.

At first glance, the most striking characteristic of a modern high-energy particle accelerator is its size. The largest storage ring at CERN for example has a 27 km circumference, and cost billions of euros to build. Even the relatively modest accelerators used to drive most modern synchrotrons take up areas the size of several football fields. The reason for this is that these conventional devices accelerate particles in a vacuum wave guide that can only sustain accelerating fields of tens to hundreds of megavolts per metre without catastrophic electrical breakdown. A promising alternative is to accelerate particles using the fast, large-amplitude plasma wave (wakefield) generated when a high-intensity laser1 or particle beam2 passes through a plasma. Such fields can reach values in excess of a hundred gigavolts per metre, suggesting the possibility of plasma-based accelerators that are orders of magnitude smaller, and many times cheaper, than conventional accelerators. Writing in this issue of Nature Physics, Martins et al.3 describe state-of-the-art computer simulations that should help researchers optimize the parameters of future plasma wakefield accelerators driven by soon-to-be-constructed petawatt classes of lasers.

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Figure 1: Results of three-dimensional simulations of the wakefield produced by a 250 J laser passing through a plasma, and the electron beams driven by the wake.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. and in the Physics Department, Raoul M. G. M. Trines is at the Central Laser Facility of the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, Oxon OX11 0QX, UK, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YB, UK. raoul.trines@stfc.ac.uk,

    Raoul M. G. M. Trines

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  1. Raoul M. G. M. Trines
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Trines, R. Plasma models get a boost. Nature Phys 6, 239–240 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1642

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1642

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