The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science in the US recently published a highlight, “Ice-Cold Plasma Electron Beams Prepare to Power Future Hard X-ray Laser Beams,” about a CI scientific research paper from the University of Strathclyde. The respective program areas of DOE highlight annually about 200 research papers of special note.
The paper, published in Nature Communications last year, shows, with high-fidelity start-to-end simulations, that a Plasma Wakefield Accelerator (PWFA) equipped with an advanced plasma photocathode injection method can produce electron beams 100,000 times brighter than state-of-the-art.
The authors demonstrated that the ultra-high brightness electron beams could be extracted, transported, and injected into an undulator without loss of charge or quality.
The DOE acknowledges this as a critical step toward the use of PWFA for future light sources, noting that such electron beams can produce bright sub-femtosecond hard X-ray pulses like those produced at the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, but in a much shorter distance.
Dr Habib, the first author of the research paper, says, “The acknowledgement from the DOE Office of Science highlights the transformative impact this novel technology can have on future light sources and applications.”
The DOE report also notes that the scheme proposed by the Strathclyde team may open novel opportunities in complementary compact accelerators and in high-energy physics research.
Reference:
A. F. Habib et al., Attosecond-Angstrom free-electron-laser towards the cold beam limit, Nature Communications 14, 1054 (2023).