Laser-driven beamlines: a novel approach towards particle acceleration
by Livia Lapadatescu (CERN)
ELI-Beamlines Facility in the Czech Republic
Image credit: ELI
The CRISP project (Cluster of Research Infrastructures for Synergies in Physics), brought together a group of eleven Research Infrastructures with the goal of creating synergies and developing common solutions in four R&D fields: Accelerators, Instruments & Experiments, Detectors & Data Acquisition and IT & Data Management.
In the Accelerators field, one of the activities focused on studying novel compact particle sources including the design of radio-frequency X-band electron sources and of laser-induced secondary particle sources.
Conventional accelerators rely on the use of radio-frequency longitudinal electric fields, which limit the energy gain per unit length, therefore increasing the size of accelerator infrastructures in order to reach higher beam energies.
Laser-plasma accelerators have proven the possibility of producing beams of 1 GeV over 3 cm of acceleration length with unique properties such as ultra-short pulse duration and high peak currents. The uniqueness of laser-driven beamlines will represent an advantage for future accelerator infrastructures, allowing them to reduce their size and cost.
The CRISP Lasers activity has analysed two kinds of laser-driven beamlines at high energy and at low energy, as well as diagnostic issue for the implementation stage, showing that:
- Capturing and transporting laser generated electrons with high energy (~8 GeV) has proven to be a challenge since they require strong magnetic fields to handle the beam;
- By reducing the energy down to 0.5 GeV, an optimized beam line can be produced with a normalized transverse emittance under control.
Moreover for the diagnostics of laser accelerated electron beams, experiments were conducted at the SPARC-LAB facility and constitute a basis for the implementation stage of laser-driven beamlines.
The study conducted by CRISP on laser-driven beamlines will have an impact on the implementation of the ELI-beamlines project (Extreme Light Infrastructure), by proposing solutions for the next generation of particle accelerators.
