Physics Colloquium, March 30, 2010
Laser-driven acceleration of relativistic charged particles in plasmas Howard M. Milchberg

University of Maryland

When selling the need for compact laser-based acceleration of charged particles, the 3 km long Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) is traditionally used as a foil. Although the electric field of even modest laser pulses in vacuum is sufficient to accelerate electrons to relativistic energies, laser-based acceleration has been achieved only recently, via 'laser-plasma acceleration'. In that method, the actual accelerating field is not the laser field but an electrostatic field in a charge density wave in plasma (a 'plasma wave'). The laser intensity threshold for driving this process is extremely high.

But what if we could reproduce the essential physics of SLAC, in which the accelerating field is from an electromagnetic guided RF wave, but do it in an extremely compact form using lasers? In this talk I will review the background and recent results in laser acceleration of particles and then describe the Maryland scheme for direct laser acceleration of electrons using indestructible slow wave structures.

Dr. Milchberg's Web Site

4:00 p.m., Physics Research Building (PRB), Room 1080

Reception at 3:45 p.m., Atrium, PRB