Laser particle acceleration in Brazil

Abstract

The fast-growing field of particle acceleration using lasers is now in a new trend due to an enormous worldwide effort to increase the peak power of femtosecond laser systems, as well as increasing the average power of these systems in order to make them useful for applications. The most spectacular example of investment in this area is the Extreme Light Infrastructure in Europe, which has led to the establishment of three large research facilities in the Czech Republic, Romania and Hungary that host some of the most powerful lasers world-wide (above PW peak power). The decade’s long progress in this area is being celebrated by the conferment of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics to Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland, who pioneered the technique of Chirped Pulse Amplification, on which all modern-day ultrashort and ultra-intense lasers are based. These lasers can produce extreme conditions that mimic the ones found in stellar cores. Besides the basic physics that is being brought to light due to these new regimes, several applications of these systems are very promising, and one of them, the acceleration of charged particles, is the goal of this program. Laser particle accelerators are compact and need less radiation shielding, predicting a significant cost reduction with impact in the widespread use, mostly in medicine.