Schemes of laser acceleration of charged particles (April 2012)
Dr. Benjamin Galow
Postdoctoral Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg (Germany)
Accelerated beams of charged particles are of paramount importance, both for fundamental research to resolve the smallest structures of our universe and for applications such as ion lithography and hadron cancer therapy. Conventional particle accelerators come along with a huge and expensive infrastructure. I will talk about alternative proposals to generate particle beams based on laser acceleration, which aim at considerably reducing the size and price tag of accelerators in the near future. Several schemes will be touched upon: (a) Direct field laser-acceleration of ions, (b) Post-acceleration of plasma-created ion beams employing crossed laser fields, (c) The production of a beam of ions from the interaction of a chirped, circularly polarized laser beam with a hydrogen gas target, and (d) Acceleration to multi-GeV electrons from cyclotron auto-resonance. (Work done in collaboration with Prof. Y. I. Salamin at AUS).
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