High average power ultrafast laser technologies for driving future advanced accelerators

Understand

Large scale laser facilities are needed to advance the energy frontier in high energy physics and accelerator physics.

• Laser plasma accelerators are core to advanced accelerator concepts aimed at reaching TeV electron electron colliders.
• In these facilities, intense laser pulses drive plasmas and are used to accelerate electrons to high energies in remarkably short distances.
• A laser plasma accelerator could in principle reach high energies with an accelerating length that is 1000 times shorter than in conventional RF based accelerators.