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A compact, high-repetition rate laser-driven plasma electron accelerator

Image from Licence Details: A compact, high-repetition rate laser-driven plasma electron accelerator

Applications: Medical imaging, radiotherapy, material inspection, security screening, production of secondary particles (positrons, neutrons, muons etc.)

Features Benefits
  • Potential to achieve very high electron beam energies (100 MeV to multi-GeV) in a compact space using “off-the-shelf” industrial lasers.
  • More powerful and efficient system compared to existing technologies.
  • Approach allows the use of new industrial-strength laser technologies (e.g. thin-disk lasers) which can generate laser pulses with high efficiency (> 10%) and at high repetition rates (1 – 10kHz).
  • Compare favourably to currently-used Ti:sapphire lasers which have very low efficiencies (<0.1%) and (at these pulse energies) are limited to pulse repetition rates below 10Hz.
  • The higher repetition rate could offer higher particle and radiation fluxes and be more stable than other laser-driven plasma accelerators.
  • This plasma accelerator could be located in the user’s lab and might even be transportable.
  • Much less space required compared to conventional RF accelerators.
  • Brings costs of system down.
  • Can generate femtosecond-duration electron bunches synchronized to short-pulse laser.
  • Ideal for driving tunable Compton X-ray sources.
  • Small X-ray source size enables high resolution imaging.
  • Includes a method for converting with high efficiency the long pulse into a train of short (~ 10 fs), equally-spaced (~ 100 fs) pulses.
  • Oxford team has demonstrated experimentally that trains of laser pulses can resonantly drive a GeV-scale plasma accelerator stage.
  • Further experiments underway.

Patented & available for:

  • Licensing
  • Co-development
  • Consulting
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