plasma acceleration

He is the inventor of the field of Plasma acceleration.

Surfatron is the colloquial name for experimental particle accelerators using plasma acceleration.

Plasma acceleration is categorized into several types according to how the electron plasma wave is formed:

There is active research on plasma acceleration with recent successes such as the doubling of the energy of 42 GeV electrons in a meter-scale accelerator.

The plasma acceleration structures are created either using ultra-short laser pulses or energetic particle beams that are matched to the plasma parameters.

The advantage of plasma acceleration is that its acceleration field can be much stronger than that of conventional radio-frequency (RF) accelerators.

UCLA Particle Beam Physics Laboratory, Plasma Acceleration at PBPL (2003)

Another method is to use plasma acceleration to reduce the distance required to accelerated electrons from rest to the energies required for UV or X-ray emission within magnetic devices.

In the early 1980s he recognized the potential that high-power lasers could have for particle acceleration, and set up a small research group in lasers base on the concept of plasma acceleration.

More recently, Plasma acceleration has emerged as a possibility to accelerate particles in a plasma medium, using the electromagnetic energy of pulsed high-power laser systems or the kinetic energy of other charged particles.

Plasma acceleration is a technique for accelerating charged particles, such as electrons, positrons and ions, using an electric field associated with electron plasma wave or other high-gradient plasma structures (like shock and sheath fields).

It is hoped that a compact particle accelerator can be created based on plasma acceleration techniques or accelerators for much higher energy can be built, if long accelerators are realizable with an accelerating field of 10 GV/m.

This type of engine is electrodeless and as such belongs to the same electric propulsion family (while differing in the method of plasma acceleration) as the electrodeless plasma thruster, the microwave arcjet, or the pulsed inductive thruster class.

These techniques offer a way to build high performance particle accelerators of much smaller size than conventional devices The basic concepts of plasma acceleration and its possibilities were originally conceived by Prof. John M. Dawson of UCLA in 1979.