Abstract
Laser-driven plasma accelerators provide acceleration gradients that are three orders of magnitude greater than those generated by conventional accelerators, offering the potential to shrink the length of accelerators by the same factor. To date, laser acceleration of electron beams to produce particle energies comparable to those offered by synchrotron light sources has been demonstrated with plasma acceleration stages that are only a few centimetres long. This Review describes the operation principles of laser-driven plasma accelerators, and gives an overview of their development from their proposal in 1979 to recent demonstrations. Potential applications of plasma accelerators are described, and the challenges that must be overcome before they can become practical tools are discussed.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks all past and present members of his research group and collaborators for stimulating discussions. The author thanks R. Bartolini, J. W. Dawson and S. Karsch for providing materials used in the preparation of this review, N. Bourgeois for performing the simulations shown in Fig. 1 and for assistance with its preparation, and C. E. Webb, A. J. Barr and P. A. Walker for helpful comments on the draft article. This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant no. EP/H011145/1) and the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/08 776/G). The author acknowledges the OSIRIS Consortium (consisting of University of California, Los Angeles, (USA), Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal) and University of Southern California (USA)) for the use of OSIRIS, and IST for providing access to the OSIRIS 2.0 framework.
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Hooker, S. Developments in laser-driven plasma accelerators. Nature Photon 7, 775â782 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.234
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.234
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