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ULTRAFAST SPECTROSCOPY

Riding the plasma wave

Nature Reviews Materials volume 4, page 227 (2019)Cite this article

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Plasma-wave accelerators — laser-driven particle accelerators — are compact sources of high-energy electrons. Writing in Nature Photonics, Andreas Döpp, Stefan Karsch and colleagues report an innovative setup for ultrafast pump–probe experiments based on plasma waves, which produces two synchronized ultrashort beams with individually adjustable energies.

Plasma-wave accelerators represent a different paradigm. Charged particles are accelerated by the electric field associated with periodic charge density perturbations in plasma that is excited using a high-intensity laser. The plasma wave accelerates electrons in a similar way to bigger accelerators, but on much smaller length scales (millimetres compared with hundreds of metres), giving rise to brilliant X-ray emission. Such setups hold promise for affordable and compact accelerators that could be used in various fields, ranging from high-energy physics to medical physics and materials science. The breadth of feasible experiments would be dramatically expanded if several synchronized ultrashort beams could be produced.

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  1. Nature Reviews Materials http://www.nature.com/natrevmats/

    Giulia Pacchioni

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  1. Giulia Pacchioni
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Correspondence to Giulia Pacchioni.

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Pacchioni, G. Riding the plasma wave. Nat Rev Mater 4, 227 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-019-0098-z

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