Laser Acceleration of Electrons: Progress Towards On-Chip Particle Acccelerators

Particle accelerators have long been at the heart of science research and have become increasingly ubiquitous in universities, hospitals, and industries. Particle accelerators today are used for everything from finding the Higgs boson, to driving x-ray lasers, to making microprocessors, to treating cancer. And, although particle accelerators have continually evolved as a result of improved manufacturing and innovative designs, accelerator technology has yet to exploit the increasingly developed field of semiconductor manufacturing. That is, until now. This talk will describe the collaborative efforts between SLAC and Stanford to make particle accelerators better, smaller, and cheaper through nanofabrication and laser technology.
In this talk, we will describe the concept and principles of a laser-driven dielectric accelerator. We will describe the fabrication process used to realize these micron-scale accelerator structures and present the latest structures fabricated at the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility. We will then describe the complementary laser-electron acceleration experiments carried out at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where we recently performed the very first proof-of-principle demonstration of this concept. Finally, we will present our research on silicon photonic accelerator structures, as a first step towards a completely integrated particle accelerator on a chip.

Speakers:

Edward A. Peralta, Ken Soong, and Chia-Ming Chang

Departments of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering Stanford University