Modern accelerators use RF cavities to accelerate electrons, but their technical limitations require building several cavities to reach required electron energies. As an example, in hard X-ray Free Electron Lasers, the length of the accelerating sections can reach several kilometers.
Ultrafast Lasers Enabling LWFA
Ultrafast intense lasers have revolutionized the accelerator community, by opening new ways of accelerating electrons, called Laser Wakefield Acceleration. This technology allows the accelerating gradient to increase by 3 orders of magnitude, paving the way for compact accelerators.
The scientific community is actively working on exploiting this unique capacity to bring this technological brick to the new accelerator architectures.
The key parameters for such acceleration process are the pulse energy, pulse duration, repetition rate and temporal contrast.
Amplitude has a long experience in developing and delivering intense lasers based on Ti:Saph technology, with a particular caution on pulse quality to ensure optimal plasma formation.
Additionally, Amplitude continuously improves the repetition rate availability on Ti:Saph lasers, demonstrating recently 700TW at 10Hz, as well as providing solutions at 100Hz repetition rate and beyond.
Finally, Amplitude continuously increases the energy and average power of Ytterbium technology, opening the way to electron acceleration at multi-kilohertz repetition rate soon.
