Particle accelerators are used in a wide variety of fields, ranging from medicine and biology to high-energy physics. The accelerating fields in conventional accelerators are limited to a few tens of MeV m(-1), owing to material breakdown at the walls of the structure. Thus, the production of energetic particle beams currently requires large-scale accelerators and expensive infrastructures. Laser-plasma accelerators have been proposed as a next generation of compact accelerators because of the huge electric fields they can sustain (>100 GeV m(-1)). However, it has been difficult to use them efficiently for applications because they have produced poor-quality particle beams with large energy spreads, owing to a randomization of electrons in phase space. Here we demonstrate that this randomization can be suppressed and that the quality of the electron beams can be dramatically enhanced. Within a length of 3 mm, the laser drives a plasma bubble that traps and accelerates plasma electrons. The resulting electron beam is extremely collimated and quasi-monoenergetic, with a high charge of 0.5 nC at 170 MeV.

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micrOMEGAs 2.0 is a code which calculates the relic density of a stable massive particle in an arbitrary model. The underlying assumption is that there is a conservation law like R-parity in supersymmetry which guarantees the stability of the lightest odd particle. The new physics model must be incorporated in the notation of CalcHEP, a package for the automatic generation of squared matrix elements. Once this is done, all annihilation and coannihilation channels are included automatically in any model. Cross-sections at v = 0, relevant for indirect detection of dark matter, are also computed automatically. The package includes three sample models: the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), the MSSM with complex phases and the NMSSM. Extension to other models, including non supersymmetric models, is described.

We present a new module of the micrOMEGAs package for the calculation of WIMP-nuclei elastic scattering cross sections relevant for the direct detection of dark matter through its interaction with nuclei in a large detector. With this new module, the computation of the direct detection rate is performed automatically for a generic model of new physics which contains a WIMP candidate. This model needs to be implemented within micrOMEGAs 2.2.1 Here we use χ to designate the DM candidate whether a fermion, scalar or vector boson.