Acceleration, storage and physics opportunities of partially stripped atoms at CERN
Dr. Mieczyslaw Witold Krasny (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris)

Atomic physics, dismissed prematurely by many to the role of introductory chemistry, had a remarkable renaissance in recent decades thanks to the new ideas and progress in laser technologies. Can this path be followed in other research domains which address femtometer length scales? The key challenge is to create high intensity and brilliance photon sources in the gamma-ray, MeV region, which is inaccessible for the FEL based technologies. The aim of the High Intensity Gamma Source (HIGS@CERN) initiative, presented in this talk, is to extend the intensity frontier of the presently operating gamma beam sources by, at least, 6-7 orders of magnitude, for tunable-energy, quasi-monochromatic gamma-rays, within the photon energy range of 1-400 MeV. The underlying idea is to use the CERNs high energy beams of partially stripped atoms as "converters" of the laser photons into the MeV gamma rays. High intensity gamma-ray beams could be used in a very broad spectrum of research domains such as:
fundamental QED measurements, dark matter searches, investigation of basic symmetries of the Universe, studies of the QCD-confinement phenomena and studies of nuclear structure.
They could generate high intensity, polarized electron, positron and muon beams for the future high energy physics projects, such as the TeV-range lepton collider and neutrino factory. They could also be used to produce intense neutron and radioactive beams for the nuclear physics applications.