Dortmund 2021 – scientific programme

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AKBP: Arbeitskreis Beschleunigerphysik

AKBP 4: New Accelerator Concepts and Hadron Accelerators

AKBP 4.7: Talk

Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 18:00–18:15, AKBPa

Laser Wakefield Acceleration to GeV Energies — •Katinka v. Grafenstein for the Non-perturbative Pair Production collaboration — Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Am Coulombwall 1, 85748 Garching, Germany

For the creation of matter-antimatter pairs from the quantum vacuum via the Breit-Wheeler mechanism, energetic γ-rays and an intense laser need to interact with each other. The Breit-Wheeler experiment in the perturbative regime has been accomplished at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1997 but was never implemented in the non-perturbative regime. At the moment, this experiment is in preparation in a fully laser-driven set-up using Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) with the ATLAS3000 laser in Garching. In the experiment an initial high energy electron beam will be sent onto a Bremsstrahlung converter to generate γ-rays that are to interact with the intense laser. For this, an electron beam with multi-Gev energies is needed. Using LWFA, electron energies of the order of few hundred MeV are nowadays commonly reached. Reaching multi-GeV energies on the other hand still holds many challenges, even though it has been accomplished. Especially, the careful design of gas targets, such as gas jets and gas cells, is essential. These have to provide homogeneous gas densities over a distance of a few centimetres. In preparation for the Breit-Wheeler experiment in Garching, Computational Fluid Dynamic simulations were conducted to design and build such gas nozzles. Their gas flow was tested using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and first LWFA experiments using these nozzles are to be conducted soon.