Gaetano Fiore, "Plasma-based accelerators: overview and some recent analytical results"

Wednesday 17 Apr 2024, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

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.