Speaker
Description
We present the latest developments and results of the “FIREBALL” experiment: a platform developed to produce dense electron-positron pair beams to study the fireball model of gamma-ray bursts.
In the fireball experiments, the collision of a 440GeV/c proton beam from SPS with a bespoke target is used to generate pair beams orders of magnitude higher yield than previous and planned future experiments. When propagating through a low-density background plasma, the pair beam is perturbed by instabilities which engender the development of magnetic fields. These instabilities have been studied in two prior campaigns. We discuss the findings of these experiments, namely the suppression of the current filamentation instability due to the transverse spread of the beam observed in the first campaign, and the magnetic fields measured in the second campaign. Finally, we discuss the planned improvements for the upcoming Fireball campaign.
