The Gamma Factory proposal for CERN

Understand

This year, 2015, marks the centenary of the publication of Einsteins Theory of General Relativity and it has been named the International Year of Light and light-based technologies by the UN General Assembly.

• It is thus timely to discuss the possibility of broadening the present CERN research program by including a new component based on a novel concept of the light source which could pave a way towards a multipurpose Gamma Factory.
• The proposed light source could be realized at CERN by using the infrastructure of the existing accelerators.
• It could push the intensity limits of the presently operating light-sources by at least 7 orders of magnitude, reaching the flux of the order of 10^17 photons/s, in the particularly interesting gamma-ray energy domain of 1 < Ephoton < 400 MeV.