A laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) that guides its laser beams along curved channels while accelerating electrons has been created by Jie Zhang and colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. The new technique could be a key step towards the development of compact, inexpensive alternatives to conventional particle accelerators.
In a LWFA, a dense plasma is created by focusing an intense laser pulse into a gas. As it moves through the gas, the pulse creates a region of alternating electric fields – a “wakefield” – that resembles a water wave that forms in the wake of a moving boat.
By riding these waves, electrons within the plasma can be accelerated to very high energies over very short distances. As a result, this technique shows great promise for developing accelerators that are much smaller than conventional systems. Such compact devices would be very useful for medical and research applications.
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