This award will support a two-year U.S.-Japan cooperative science project between Professor Toshi Tajima, Department of Physics, University of Texas, Austin, and Professor Atsushi Ogata, National Laboratory for High Energy Physics (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan. The purpose of the project is to investigate and explore novel methods of particle acceleration via intense lasers experimentally and theoretically for future accelerators. Among the projects to be explored are the laser wakefield acceleration, ionization front wake, and plasma resonant cavity. The salability to higher energies will be investigated experimentally and theoretically. The expertise of the U.S. and Japanese groups are complementary. The U.S. investigators will travel to Tsukuba to coordinate and fine-tune their work on computational, theoretical, and laser development with the experimental results obtained by the Japanese group. The U.S. group has developed a theoretical and computational model of wakefield excitation by intense short laser pulses, while the Japanese group has carried out wakefield excitation experiments by a charged particle beam and assembled a team of experimentalists for a laser wakefield excitation.
