Particle accelerators have been instrumental in unraveling some of the deep questions related to matter at the fundamental level, the latest being discovery of the Higgs Boson. The conventional accelerators, however, have reached their limit in terms of size and energy, as acceleration gradients in the state of art accelerators have reached the material breakdown limit (~ MV/cm). A new principle of particle acceleration is desirable at this juncture. A strong candidate for this is the plasma wake field based acceleration (driven by lasers and/or particle beams). This scheme provides a promise of about thousand fold increase in the acceleration gradient (~ GV/cm). Furthermore, plasma being already a broken down medium, does not get adversely effected by such huge electric fields. This paves a way for building table top compact accelerators for electron as well as ion beams which can make crucial contributions to our fundamental understanding of matter and would have applications in many...
Description