Compared to conventional accelerators, plasmas can sustain much higher electric field gradients within them, reducing the distance required to accelerate charged particles to very high energies by several orders of magnitude as a result. Plasma accelerators, with their extremely high acceleration gradient, hold the promise of realising cheaper, compact accelerators for fundamental science and applications alike, cutting across a multitude of areas in society. Radiation sources produced by laser-driven accelerators are super-bright and “point-like” in space and time, offering a radically different approach that has the potential of major scale size reductions combined with unique capabilities compared to conventional accelerator technology. The UK has been a world-leader in this area, with many of the milestone research and proof-of-principle applications emerging from experiments conducted at CLF. EPAC builds on this expertise.
EPAC will be an exceptional science driver, providing a step-change in capabilities for laser-driven accelerator research in the UK, with multi-GeV electron beams and spatially coherent x-ray and gamma-ray beams for cutting-edge experiments in plasma physics, laboratory astrophysics and condensed matter and material science. The unique capabilities of EPAC, combining near-light speed particles and synchronised ultra-intense electromagnetic fields, would provide a world-leading platform capable of generating extreme states of matter and the tools to probe, control and manipulate them, enabling exploration of some key fundamental questions in nature including those in quantum electrodynamics. EPAC will be the test bed for other plasma accelerator-based facilities worldwide that are in pipeline. There is also potential impact on long term fundamental science programmes, such as the future technical basis of particle physics accelerators, that will likely require this sort of disruptive approach to accelerator science.
EPAC will be driven by a 10Hz Petawatt laser enabled by STFC’s proprietary DiPOLE laser technology developed by CLF. The versatile experimental areas in EPAC can drive bright, beam-like high-energy x-ray beams and beams of high-energy electrons, protons, ions, neutrons and muons by merely changing the target geometry, enabling multi-modal imaging and probing capabilities for fundamental science and applications.
To start with, EPAC will deliver its state-of-the-art Petawatt laser to two independent radiologically shielded experimental areas that complement each other in terms of their scientific capabilities:
Experimental Area 1 (EA1) has a fixed configuration, delivering a long-focus laser beamline predominantly for driving a laser-wakefield accelerator. Sources derived from the accelerator will be used for experiments and industrial applications in the 20 m x 9 m applications area.
EA2 contains a large vacuum chamber that can be configured in a flexible way with short, medium, and long-focus beamline options. The primary application of the area will be high density laser-matter interactions for optimisation of secondary sources as well as fundamental science studies.
