Abstract

Laser-driven particle acceleration is revealing itself as a very promising future alternative to RF particle acceleration. The concept of this acceleration technology is to employ a photonic structure that controls an electromagnetic wave in such a way as to produce a continuous acceleration force along the electron beam trajectory. The electrons travel in a vacuum space, which eliminates scattering from matter and degradation of the particle beam. In contrast to RF accelerators the wavelength of the accelerating field is reduced by almost 5 orders of magnitude to the visible or near infrared, which is readily available from efficient tabletop lasers and allows the use of dielectric materials that can sustain peak electric fields of 10¹⁰ V/m from 100 fsec near-infrared laser pulses.

© 2007 IEEE