부산대학교 도서관

Quick off the mark Plasma-based particle accelerators are particularly attractive as they are capable of producing accelerating fields orders of magnitude larger than those used in conventional colliders. In an experiment run at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a high-energy electron beam has been used successfully to drive a plasma wakefield accelerator. This type of accelerator exploits the electric field of a dense electron bunch to drive a wakefield that accelerates the particles in the back of the bunch. A remarkable rate of acceleration was observed: for a small fraction of the injected electrons an energy gain equivalent to that achieved in the full 3-km SLAC accelerator was produced in less than a metre. This is an important step towards demonstrating the viability of plasma accelerators for high-energy physics applications.