An elegant new concept may be about to revolutionize the technology of particle acceleration, which animates huge atom smashers and x-ray sources. For decades, some physicists have strived to develop an accelerator powered by laser light that would be much smaller and cheaper than existing machines. Recent progress suggests laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) may soon realize that bright promise.
Most recently, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) used the approach to boost electrons to an energy of 9.2 giga-electron volts (GeV) over just 30 centimeters, as they reported in December 2024 in Physical Review Letters. That’s more than twice the energy achieved by a new 1-kilometer-long, $1.1 billion linear accelerator (LINAC) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Although LPAs still produce relatively ragged electron beams, physicists around the world are already racing to put them to work.
“We’re moving from a phase in which the plasma accelerator is the object of study to one in which it’s doing something useful,” says Simon Hooker, a laser physicist at the University of Oxford. LPAs can’t yet deliver the exquisitely tuned beams that physicists prize, but the much cheaper machines could find niches where beam quality isn’t so crucial, says Samuel Barber, an accelerator physicist at LBNL. “You can develop a more bespoke machine.”
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