Plasma wakefield accelerators: beam quality and staging
This text mentions work from 2024 on. Those parts were partly written without a live literature search and have not been checked by an editor yet.
A laser pulse or particle bunch moving through plasma leaves a wake of electric field about a thousand times stronger than in ordinary accelerators, and particles moving with the wake gain energy quickly. Turning this into a collider needs beams that stay tiny and nearly monoenergetic over many stages, and needs positrons as well as electrons.
Why it matters
Plasma accelerators could shorten TeV-scale colliders and X-ray free-electron lasers by large factors.
Review
C. A. Lindstrom, S. Corde, R. D'Arcy, S. Gessner, M. Gilljohann, M. J. Hogan, J. Osterhoff, Beam-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration, arXiv:2504.05558, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05558 reference checked
Timestamp record
- Signed record
- df8d7bd34712…
- Public log
- Entry 310, in checkpoint 2,123
- In the log by
- Block 969,698, 2026-10-03
This text was in the PubPhys log by that date. The date says nothing about when the problem was first posed.