Staging of Plasma Accelerators for Realizing Timely Applications

Introduction

High-energy physics is headed for an impasse: the next particle collider will cost several billion euros, and while designs have been ready for a decade, they are so expensive that no host country has come forward—a problem that will soon impact progress in the field.

Plasma Acceleration Technology

Plasma acceleration is a novel technology promising to fix this issue. With accelerating fields 1000 times larger than in conventional machines, the size and cost of future accelerators can be drastically reduced. However, there is a gap between what current plasma accelerators can do and what the next collider requires. Therefore, a recent R&D roadmap (European Strategy for Particle Physics) calls for intensified plasma-accelerator research, as well as an intermediate demonstrator facility.

SPARTA Objectives

SPARTA tackles two basic problems in plasma acceleration:

1. To reach high energy by connecting multiple accelerator stages without degrading the accelerated beam.
2. To do so in a stable manner.

Access to stable, high-energy electron beams at a fraction of today’s cost will enable ground-breaking advances in strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED), an important near-term experiment that doubles as a demo facility.

Proposed Concepts

I have proposed two concepts for overcoming these problems:

1. Nonlinear plasma lenses for transport between stages.
2. A new mechanism for self-stabilization.

Can these concepts be realized in practice?

Project Objectives

Making use of numerical simulations and beam-based experiments at international accelerator labs, this project has 3 objectives:

1. Develop nonlinear plasma lenses experimentally.
2. Investigate self-stabilization, theoretically and experimentally.
3. Design a plasma-accelerator facility for SFQED.

Impact

Reaching this goal will not only impact high-energy physics, producing advances in SFQED and serving as a major step toward realizing a collider, but also society at large. Applications of high-energy electrons, from bright x-ray beams to advanced cancer treatments, will all become significantly more affordable.