Description
This contribution discusses the possibility of creating novel research tools at CERN by producing and storing highly relativistic atomic beams in its high-energy storage rings, and by exciting their atomic degrees of freedom by lasers to produce high-energy photon beams. Their intensity would be, by several orders of magnitude, higher than those of the presently operating light sources, in the particularly interesting gamma-ray energy domain reaching up to 400 MeV. In this energy domain, the high-intensity photon beams can be used to produce secondary beams of polarised electrons, polarised positrons, polarised muons, neutrinos, neutrons and radioactive ions. The atomic beams, the photon beams and the above secondary beams are the principal research tools of the proposed Gamma Factory. New research opportunities in a wide domain of fundamental and applied physics can be opened by the Gamma Factory scientific programme.
