Speaker
Description
The CLF is now constructing a new facility - the Extreme Photonics Applications Centre (EPAC). EPAC’s technology is based on plasma accelerators driven by high-power laser pulses. Plasma accelerators, with their extremely high acceleration gradient, hold the promise of realising cheaper, compact accelerators for fundamental science and applications alike [1], cutting across a multitude of areas in society. We present an overview of EPAC, describing the overall architecture and some of the technical challenges in the design.
EPAC will be driven by a 10 Hz Petawatt laser, comprising an OPCPA front-end delivering energies up to 1 J in a stretched 4 ns pulse, followed by a Ti:Sapphire multi-pass amplified enabled by STFC’s proprietary DiPOLE laser technology developed by CLF. After compression, EPAC will deliver a 30 J, 30 fs laser beam, centred at 800 nm, to two experimental areas: EA1 and EA2.
EA1 will be configured as a fixed geometry, long focus beamline, primarily for generating electron beams in gas targets through laser-wakefield acceleration (LWFA). The high repetition rate will enable large-scale parameter scans and the use of automated optimisation routines to study LWFA physics [2], producing high quality electron beams in the multi-GeV energy range.
EA2 has been designed as a flexible experimental area capable of undertaking laser-matter interactions with both short (f/3) and long focus (f/35) geometries, with ion acceleration being the main science driver. The primary aim of EA2 will be the delivery of high energy electrons, protons, ions, X-rays, and gamma rays.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{fig_1.png}
\caption{Overview of the first planned experiment in EA1, to deliver and characterize an electron beam generated from LWFA.}
\label{fig:layout}
\end{figure}
References
1. Bohlen et al., PRAB 25, 031301 (2022)
2. Shalloo et al., Nature Comm 11, 6355 (2020)
Acknowledgements
The CLF is part UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a public body of the Government of the United Kingdom that directs research and innovation funding, funded through the science budget of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
