Gaetano Fiore, "Plasma-based accelerators: overview and some recent analytical results"
2G26
Particle accelerators have paramount applications in medicine, particle physics, material science, structural biology, industry, environmental remediation, cultural heritage study, FEL, research in inertial fusion, detection systems, … Plasma-based acceleration mechanisms are very promising for reducing the sizes of accelerators even by 3 orders of magnitude. In the talk I will first give a short overview on such mechanisms, focusing on Laser Wake Field Acceleration (LWFA); then describe some recent analytical results of ours, which may help in tailoring the initial plasma density profile to the plasma pulse in order to maximize LWFA of self-injected bunches of electrons. We use a simplified, fully relativistic plane model whereby the light-like coordinate ξ = ct−z replaces time t as the independent variable, and the Lorentz-Maxwell & continuity PDEs are reduced to a continuous family of pairs of Hamilton equations, which are decoupled up to wave-breaking.