Fundamental studies and applications of laser-based accelerators

Particle beams are very common in our daily life and are used to visualize the interior of the human body, and in radiotherapy to cure cancer.

For fundamental science, high-energy particle beams are of crucial importance, and they are used to diagnose the structure of materials, molecules and subatomic particles with extreme precision and detail. The higher particle energies that can be achieved, the smaller objects can be studied. However, conventional acceleration techniques are reaching their limits, leading to very large and costly facilities.

The use of an ionized gas (or plasma) as accelerator medium circumvents the most significant barriers of conventional techniques, and allow increasing the energy gained per unit length by several orders of magnitude. Plasma accelerators can therefore provide much smaller yet very powerful accelerators.

This proposal aims to actively develop this new field of research and tackle the most significant challenges.

Using high-power lasers, the central limits currently restricting acceleration, will be confronted and a set of cross-disciplinary topics will be pursued, in medical radiation physics (high-energy electron therapy), X-ray imaging (phase-contrast tomography), and materials science (dynamics of transient phenomena).

An original aspect is that this proposal bridges the gap between laser- and particle-beam-driven plasmas and explores the possibility to significantly boost the energy of conventional accelerators (e.g. MAX-IV).