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Plasma acceleration
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Plasma acceleration
Plasma acceleration is a technique for accelerating charged particles, such as electrons or ions, using the electric field associated with an electron plasma wave or other high-gradient plasma structures. These structures are created using either ultra-short laser pulses or energetic particle beams that are matched to the plasma parameters. The technique offers a way to build affordable and compact particle accelerators.
Fully developed, the technology could replace many of the traditional accelerators with applications ranging from high energy physics to medical and industrial applications. Medical applications include betatron and free-electron light sources for diagnostics or radiation therapy and proton sources for hadron therapy.
The basic concepts of plasma acceleration and its possibilities were conceived by Toshiki Tajima and John M. Dawson of UCLA in 1979. The initial experimental designs for a "wakefield" accelerator were developed at UCLA by Chandrashekhar J. Joshi et al.
The Texas Petawatt laser facility at the University of Texas at Austin accelerated electrons to 2 GeV over about 2 cm (1.6×1021 gn). This record was broken in 2014 by the scientists at the BELLA Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, when they produced electron beams up to 4.25 GeV.
In late 2014, researchers from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory using the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) published proof of the viability of plasma acceleration technology, showing that it could produce 400 to 500 times higher energy transfer compared to a general linear accelerator design.
The AWAKE proof-of-principle wakefield accelerator experiment using a 400 GeV proton beam from the Super Proton Synchrotron has operated at CERN since the end of 2016.
In August 2020 scientists demonstrated the longest stable operation of 30 continuous hours.
A plasma is a fluid of positive and negative charged particles, generally created by heating or photo-ionizing (direct / tunneling / multi-photon / barrier-suppression) a dilute gas. Under normal conditions the plasma is macroscopically neutral (or quasi-neutral), an equal mix of electrons and ions in equilibrium. However, if a sufficient external electric or electromagnetic field is applied, the plasma electrons, which are much lighter than the background ions (by a factor of 1836), separate spatially, creating a charge imbalance in the perturbed region. A particle injected into such a plasma is accelerated by the charge separation field, but since the magnitude of this separation is generally similar to that of the external field, nothing is gained in comparison to a conventional system that simply applies the field directly to the particle. However, the plasma medium is the most efficient known transformer of the transverse field of an electromagnetic wave into longitudinal fields of a plasma wave. In existing accelerator technology various materials are used to convert transversely propagating fields into longitudinal fields that can kick the particles. This process is achieved using two approaches: standing-wave structures (such as resonant cavities) or traveling-wave structures such as disc-loaded waveguides. Materials interacting with higher and higher fields eventually get destroyed through ionization and breakdown. Plasma acceleration can generate, sustain, and exploit the strongest fields ever produced in the laboratory.
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Plasma acceleration
Plasma acceleration is a technique for accelerating charged particles, such as electrons or ions, using the electric field associated with an electron plasma wave or other high-gradient plasma structures. These structures are created using either ultra-short laser pulses or energetic particle beams that are matched to the plasma parameters. The technique offers a way to build affordable and compact particle accelerators.
Fully developed, the technology could replace many of the traditional accelerators with applications ranging from high energy physics to medical and industrial applications. Medical applications include betatron and free-electron light sources for diagnostics or radiation therapy and proton sources for hadron therapy.
The basic concepts of plasma acceleration and its possibilities were conceived by Toshiki Tajima and John M. Dawson of UCLA in 1979. The initial experimental designs for a "wakefield" accelerator were developed at UCLA by Chandrashekhar J. Joshi et al.
The Texas Petawatt laser facility at the University of Texas at Austin accelerated electrons to 2 GeV over about 2 cm (1.6×1021 gn). This record was broken in 2014 by the scientists at the BELLA Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, when they produced electron beams up to 4.25 GeV.
In late 2014, researchers from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory using the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) published proof of the viability of plasma acceleration technology, showing that it could produce 400 to 500 times higher energy transfer compared to a general linear accelerator design.
The AWAKE proof-of-principle wakefield accelerator experiment using a 400 GeV proton beam from the Super Proton Synchrotron has operated at CERN since the end of 2016.
In August 2020 scientists demonstrated the longest stable operation of 30 continuous hours.
A plasma is a fluid of positive and negative charged particles, generally created by heating or photo-ionizing (direct / tunneling / multi-photon / barrier-suppression) a dilute gas. Under normal conditions the plasma is macroscopically neutral (or quasi-neutral), an equal mix of electrons and ions in equilibrium. However, if a sufficient external electric or electromagnetic field is applied, the plasma electrons, which are much lighter than the background ions (by a factor of 1836), separate spatially, creating a charge imbalance in the perturbed region. A particle injected into such a plasma is accelerated by the charge separation field, but since the magnitude of this separation is generally similar to that of the external field, nothing is gained in comparison to a conventional system that simply applies the field directly to the particle. However, the plasma medium is the most efficient known transformer of the transverse field of an electromagnetic wave into longitudinal fields of a plasma wave. In existing accelerator technology various materials are used to convert transversely propagating fields into longitudinal fields that can kick the particles. This process is achieved using two approaches: standing-wave structures (such as resonant cavities) or traveling-wave structures such as disc-loaded waveguides. Materials interacting with higher and higher fields eventually get destroyed through ionization and breakdown. Plasma acceleration can generate, sustain, and exploit the strongest fields ever produced in the laboratory.