Wakefield Acceleration: Entering also into the High Density Regime

Abstract

Wakefield acceleration has been invented to utilize the plasma’s huge collective fields to turn them into a robust, stable, accelerating fields in order to compactify the conventional accelerators by many orders of magnitude. The lasers and beam-injectors have advanced, many proof-of-principle experiments have been realized, and some real world applications have been in practice so far. In the relativistic regime the transverse photon electromagnetic fields can be now turned into longitudinal accelerating fields with the high phase velocity regime realizing very robust structured accelerating conditions even in plasma that some consider as inherently amorphous media. Meanwhile, here we further introduce two new elements, the solid-state media such as carbon nano-tubes (CNT) in place of plasma, while we also look at the regime of high density wakefield acceleration. These combined elements point to a new opportunity of very tiny (on the order of micron) accelerators as well as the control of the phase velocity of wakefields. We envision applications of these tiny accelerators such as to radiotherapy at the tip of an endoscopy.