The Central Laser Facility at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK is now building a new laser application centre. This £81.2 M facility will use STFC’s patented diode-pumped laser technology (DiPOLE) to drive plasma accelerators, producing novel particle and x-ray beams for imaging critical industrial components and biomedical systems. This application centre will build a unique...
A key next step in advancing the technology of laser plasma accelerators (LPA) is to show that they can be operated at high average power, i.e., high repetition rate of kHz and higher. Previous workshop reports on laser technology for accelerators and national and international roadmaps have all advocated for the need for such systems. The rapid advances in laser technology are now making it...
We will review our recent research activities on high-repetition rate laser-wakefield acceleration. In a recent series of experiments, we have used millijoule near-single-cycle laser pulses of 3.5 fs duration at kHz repetition rate to accelerate electrons to 5 MeV energies. The single-cycle laser pulses were able to excite nonlinear plasma wakefields and accelerate electrons to MeV energies in...
