Feb 26 – 28, 2024
Trento
Europe/Rome timezone

Fundamental research and applications with the EuPRAXIA facility at LNF (Invited)

Feb 26, 2024, 5:05 PM
30m

Speaker

Silvia Pisano (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Description

In the next years, the Italian Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of INFN will
play a crucial role in the development of plasma-based acceleration techniques.
In fact, it is involved in the EuPRAXIA initiative, that aims at realizing the
first laser plasma user facility worldwide. The R&D activity ongoing in this
field is hosted at SPARC LAB (Sources for Plasma Accelerators and Radiation
Compton with Laser And Beam), that consists in a conventional high brightness
RF photo-injector and a multi-hundred terawatt laser. While pushing forward
the research in the field of plasma acceleration, the equipment installed in the
infrastructure can as well provide different radiation sources that can be ex-
ploited to carry out measurements in the nuclear physics field and to develop
applications in different sectors of interest, as cultural heritage and biophysics.
In particular, present and future laser facilities, that will reach intensity frontiers
as high as 10^21 W/cm2, may represent an excellent environment where designing
laser-based experiments relevant both for the field of nuclear astrophysics as well
as for the general investigation of nuclear processes in plasma. Currently, the
Frascati Laser for Acceleration and Multidisciplinary Experiments (FLAME) is
installed in the SPARC LAB to study the laser-matter interaction with solids
and gases at high laser intensities, up to 10^20 W/cm2. In a longer perspective,
the laser will be upgraded to a Peta-Watt regime, opening the possibility to fur-
ther extend the thermodynamic reach of the created plasmas. At SPARC LAB
different experiments are being planned: for example, the deuterium fusion in-
vestigation (d + d → 3He + n) for the nuclear astrophysics measurements, but
also studies of nuclear decays in plasma as a function of laser operation param-
eters such as beam spot size, intensity and pulse duration, that will eventually
affect the thermodynamics properties of the created plasma. Beyond this, also
other radiations that the facility will be able to produce (electrons, photons of
different characteristics, neutrons, protons and positrons) can be exploited for
the design of tools to be used, among the others, in the analysis of artworks, as
well as for the study of biological compounds. Laser wakefield accelerator based
light sources (LWFA) like betatron radiation sources, indeed, have many po-tential applications in different fields like X-ray phase contrast imaging (XPCI) and material science.
In this talk, the new facility will be presented, and the specific aspects of the different radiation sources that can be exploited for applications both in fundamental and applied research fields will be discussed.

Primary author

Silvia Pisano (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Presentation materials