Speaker
Description
Laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) were proposed 50 years ago as a compact alternative to radio-frequency technology. In an LPA, an intense laser pulse travels through a plasma and excites a plasma wave traveling behind it. LPAs can sustain acceleration gradients beyond 100 GV/m - thousands of times higher than conventional accelerator technology, allowing reducing the size of the machine by similar amounts. LPAs have evolved from the initial concept to machines delivering nearly 10 GeV energy gains in tens of centimetres and operating for extended periods of time with high repeatability.
LPA is an ideal candidate to develop a compact muon source due to availability of GeV beams from metre-scale setups. In an LPA-driven source, muon pairs are produced by energetic bremstrahlung photons in the strong field of heavy nuclei, resulting in an inherently collimated, low emittance and ultrashort pulse duration muon beam. Using currently widely used and available laser systems would enable constructing a source with an average flux of the order of 1000 muons per second. I will discuss the physics and progress of LPAs along with the scaling of the generated muon beam, highlighting the potential of this novel accelerator technology for generating compact, portable muon sources.
