Plasma wakefield acceleration provides efficient linear particle acceleration

Nature : The process of plasma wakefield acceleration was first proposed 30 years ago but has only recently become technically feasible. Now, Michael Litos of SLAC’s National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, and his colleagues have built a functioning accelerator capable of producing an energy gain per unit of length that is 1000 times higher than even the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The technique fires paired bunches of electrons into plasmas. As the first bunch of electrons enters the plasma, its charge pushes the electrons in the plasma away from the beam path, which creates a positively charged channel. That area pulls the plasma electrons back toward the center and, in doing so, accelerates the second bunch of electrons that is following behind the first. The technique works only for linear accelerators, which means it could be adapted to shrink the proposed International Linear Collider from 30 km in length to just 4.5 km. Smaller accelerators would also be able to be easily installed at universities and even hospitals where they could be used for medical imaging.