Scientists have made a significant advance in laser plasma acceleration. By employing an innovative method, a research team managed to substantially exceed the previous record for proton acceleration. For the first time, they achieved energies that so far have only seemed possible at much larger facilities.
As the research group reported, promising applications in medicine and materials science have now become much likelier.
Laser plasma acceleration opens up interesting perspectives: compared to conventional accelerators, it holds the promise of more compact, more energy-efficient facilities -- because instead of employing powerful radio waves to get particles moving, the new technology uses lasers to accelerate them. The principle is that extremely short, but high-intensity laser pulses fire on wafer-thin foils.
"The result is that a complex cascade of acceleration mechanisms is triggered in the material," says Ziegler,"causing the protons contained in the film to be accelerated much more than they were by our DRACO laser." In figures: whereas the facility previously achieved proton energies of approximately 80 MeV, it can now generate 150 MeV -- almost double.
Extremely intense light pulses generated by free-electron lasers are versatile tools in research. Particularly in the X-ray range, they can be deployed to analyze the details of atomic ...
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