Interdisciplinary Instrumentation Colloquium

“Pathway to the Next Generation Laser Plasma Accelerator Drivers”

by Almantas Galvanauskas (U. of Michigan)

US/Pacific
Auditorium (Building 50)

Auditorium

Building 50

Description
Practical applications of laser plasma accelerators, as well as the development of future large-scale LPA machines for fundamental high-energy science, will require a new generation of high-intensity ultrashort pulse laser drivers. A key characteristic of these drivers is that they should operate at kHz repetition rates - more than three orders of magnitude higher than the current state-of-the-art, while still producing petawatt-level peak powers. For example, for a large-scale machine this can translate to approximately 50J per <100fs pulse with 0.5MW average power at 10kHz. Since fundamental limitations in presently used high-intensity lasers prevent their scaling to such extraordinarily high powers, this compels to seek radically new approaches to leapfrog current technological capabilities.
As a result, new concepts and techniques are emerging which replace an old notion of increasing pulse energy through increasing transverse-aperture size of a single laser, by a new notion of exploiting coherent multiplexing of signals in spatial, spectral and time domains to synthesize a high-energy pulse beam from a multitude of much smaller apertures. This is a paradigm shift in laser-driver architecture, which can far exceed power, energy, and pulse duration limitations of individual lasers. Use of fiber technology, which can achieve monolithic integration of complex laser systems, is particularly promising in this context, since it can establish a compact, efficient and power scalable laser-driver technology platform. In the near term such high power (up to 10 kW), ultra-short-pulse laser systems will enable new low-cost, compact accelerator-based X-ray, gamma ray, and particle sources for a wide range of biological, chemical, material science, and security applications. In the longer term, the scalability and efficiency of this laser technology could enable high-average-power (100kW to MW) LPAs with the energy and luminosity compatible with HEP science goals for particle physics—at a cost that is within societal funding constraints for those endeavors.