42 GeV Energy Gain in Plasma Wakefield Accelerator

A new report last week improved the energy gain in electron plasma wakefield accelerator to 42 GeV. The work reported by the SLAC, UCLA, and USC group adds another advancement in the advanced accelerator technique. Previously, other groups have reported improvement in energy gain using laser plasma wakefield technique.

There are still major issues in being able to use such techniques in actual applications. The energy spread is still rather large, and the emittance is also not optimal for applications such as FEL and high energy physics collider, which require very low emittance. However, in making a compact accelerator for applications that do not require such strict parameters, these techniques are showing amazing advancement.

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