Speaker
Description
Muons and their applications in tomography of large objects have recently gained significant interest within the accelerator physics community. However, the lack of portable muon sources has limited muon tomography to relying on cosmic rays, which are characterized by a low and non-directional flux. This restricts muon tomography to objects that remain immobile for extended periods. Laser-Plasma Accelerators (LPAs) have demonstrated production of multi-GeV-class electron beams over compact accelerating lengths. When a converter target is placed in front of the generated electron beam, a substantial number of muon pairs are produced via the Bethe-Heitler process. Therefore, an LPA can serve as a compact high-flux muon source. In this talk, we present recent experimental results at the BELLA Center, where muon production from LPA-produced, multi-GeV electron beams was demonstrated. Simulations show that the interaction of the beam with the electron beam dump produces a collimated cone of muon pairs, which were detected on the other side of the wall using scintillating paddles.
This work was supported by DARPA and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and used the computational facilities at NERSC.
