Particle Acceleration Using High-Power Laser Systems
Prof. Malte Kaluza (Universtität Jena)

The interaction of high-power laser pulses with matter has lead to the acceleration of charged particles such as electrons and positively charged ions. Using stat-of-the-art laser systems, these particles can reach kinetic energies in excess of 1 GeV over acceleration distances of several micrometers to a few centimeters only. While this new approach to particle acceleration still requires a lot of effort towards an improved stability and quality of the generated particle pulses, it can be regarded to be complementary with respect to conventional particle accelerator concepts. One of the remarkable features e.g. of the generated electron pulses is their ultra-short duration which is inherent to the underlying acceleration mechanism as it has first been predicted by numerical simulations. Using specially adapted optical probing techniques it could recently be shown that the duration of these bunches is indeed as short as a few femtoseconds only. This unique feature of this particle radiation strongly highlights the potential of this acceleration technique to realize a table-top source of secondary radiation producing ultra-short pulses with a wave length variable over a broad range.
Additionally, ions can also be accelerated to kinetic energies of several 10 MeV to more than 100 MeV during the interaction of laser pulses with solid or liquid targets. Since for many of the envisaged applications the particle energy has to be further increased and since additionally a tailorable spectrum would be highly desirable, several new approaches are currently under investigation to further boost the peak energy and shape the spectrum of the particles by optimizing the experimental conditions.
This talk will give a short overview over the physics underlying the interaction of high-intensity laser pulses with matter, introduce the dominant particle acceleration mechanisms which can explain the recent experimental results in this field and finally discuss future requirements for the driving laser sources for a further improvement of this new particle source.