Accelerators and Light Sources of Tomorrow: Accelerating with Light

Accelerators are far from achieving the highest energies their builders aspire to, but size and cost may limit the kinds of facilities funding agencies can support. In the future, new kinds of machines will be needed to make further progress. Perhaps the most promising is the laser plasma accelerator. Sophisticated as it is, a superconducting linac is a conventional particle accelerator that, in a machine like the Next Generation Light Source (NGLS) now under study, can be used to produce superbright laser beams. The inverse is also true: powerful lasers can be used to accelerate charged particles - but in ways that are anything but conventional. More>