Accelerator physics
Accelerators form the backbone of SLAC's on-site experimental program. They are complicated machines, with hundreds of thousands of components that all need to be designed, engineered and operated to achieve the highest energy acceleration with the best particle beam properties possible.
Research at SLAC is continually improving accelerators, both at SLAC and at other laboratories, and is also paving the way to a new generation of particle acceleration technology.
Accelerator R&D
Housed in one of the world’s longest buildings, SLAC's famous linear accelerator, or linac, has 2 miles of copper cavities that use radio-frequency waves to push electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, to high energies.
Physicists and engineers at SLAC use their deep knowledge of constructing large accelerators to upgrade existing accelerators or create new ones.
As one of five US institutions that are part of the LHC Accelerator Research Program, SLAC is helping develop new accelerator technology for planned upgrades for the newly commissioned Large Hadron Collider at the European physics laboratory CERN. SLAC physicists are also instrumental in developing the accelerator technology required to build the proposed International Linear Collider.
SLAC researchers have contributed key knowledge to the proposed International Linear Collider project, helping reduce a problem called the "electron cloud effect" which would disrupt beams and prevent such a large-scale accelerator from operating with the precision required.
Advanced accelerators
Future generations of particle accelerators will use entirely different technologies from those that exist now. SLAC researchers have led the way in developing "plasma wakefield" accelerators, which boost electrons to very high energies in very short distances by making them surf on a wave of plasma. The technology has the potential to create accelerators that are 100 times more powerful or are one hundredth of the length for the same energy reach. The FACET project uses the first two-thirds of the SLAC linac to develop this technology. Early experiments have achieved energy increases of billions of electronvolts in mere tens of centimeters.
An alternative approach to accelerating particles involves boosting them with lasers. Working with researchers at other institutions, SLAC researchers are exploring the concept of using high-power lasers to accelerate electrons to high energies.
The research on advanced acceleration techniques is at an early stage but promises great advances in producing more compact, higher energy accelerators for many future applications.
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