This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This is a collaborative project involving a consortium of six premier U.S universities and one national laboratory to train graduate students in an area of anticipated manpower need: advanced acceleration techniques. In particular, students will be trained in experiment, theory and computer simulations on plasma-based particle accelerators. Recent results in this field have shown that plasma-based particle accelerators have the potential to drastically reduce the size and hopefully the cost of future colliders needed for basic science on the one hand and to lead to table-top electron accelerators for myriad industrial, medical and research applications on the other.
This project seeks to provide a coordinated learning and research experience for Ph.D. students from leading research institutions that have developed different sets of experimental and theoretical/simulations tools. The topics proposed for their theses span fundamental science yet to be uncovered in the plasma-based accelerators field, the development of new diagnostic techniques, advancing the underlying theory, and advancing the use of computational techniques to model both fundamental phenomenology and ongoing experiments. Examples of basic science topics that will be experimentally investigated include ionization induced trapping, generation of He2+ ion beams, acceleration of electrons and generation of radiation in spatially modulated plasma waveguides, control of plasma wakefields using a beat-wave or two-color scheme and the development of a high repetition rate wakefield accelerator. While most of the experiments will be done using high power lasers, the 75 MeV electron beam facility (ATF) at Brookhaven will be used to investigate high-gradient, high-efficiency acceleration of electrons in a beam driven wakefield. Much effort will be devoted to the development of diagnostic techniques. For instance a Faraday rotation technique will be explored as a means to identify the self-trapping of particles in the wake whereas a tomographic imaging technique will be developed to enable visualization of the evolving wakes. Theoretical/computational effort will focus on many fronts including emittance preservation in wakefields, self-propagation of laser pulses over pump depletion distances, novel strategies for acceleration of positrons, and physics of electron trapping and injection in plasma accelerators.
Plasma-based accelerator laboratories arguably contain the most complex and cross-disciplinary instrumentation as any on a campus. In addition, the field of plasma-based acceleration is also very cross disciplinary. Computer simulations in this area are at the forefront of computational science and high performance computing. Furthermore, the field is also at the forefront of closely coupling experimental data to simulation data. The challenges of using complex experimental and computational instruments to carry out cross disciplinary research attracts creative physics and engineering students as well as provides them with an excellent training environment.
Plasma-based acceleration has the potential for broad impact. It may some day be the technology used to build a future linear collider at the energy frontier as well as be the basis for compact accelerators that would have use in medicine and novel photon sources. The intent of this project is to provide the graduate students with a sense of community through the formation of a multi-university consortium that has access to state-of-the-art facilities and a multi-disciplinary intellectual environment. This will be accomplished through sharing of intellectual as well as of experimental resources. The students will be in direct contact with a large number of leading researchers in the field. The project will produce a trained workforce that is comfortable with complex systems, interdisciplinary research and collaboration, reporting of findings to colleagues, and ready for future challenges, such as a future plasma-based high-energy particle collider at the energy frontier.
