Accelerator‐driven high‐energy‐density physics: Status and chances

Abstract

We review the development of high‐energy‐density physics (HEDP) driven by intense particle beams, and give an account of the current status and the anticipated developments in the near future. Since progress of this field is strongly coupled to the technical development of high‐current accelerators, we report on the recent results in specific areas of high‐current accelerators relevant to HEDP. These are related to dynamic vacuum problems and the activation of accelerator structural material by high‐current, high‐energy particle beams, and we give an example of dense plasma diagnostics with high‐energy protons. The reported results have been achieved at existing machines at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI‐Darmstadt), the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow (ITEP‐Moscow), and the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP‐Lanzhou), and they are relevant for facilities under construction such as the FAIR facility in Darmstadt and the High Intensity Accelerator Facility (HIAF) proposed in China.

Observation of a high degree of stopping for laser-accelerated intense proton beams in dense ionized matter

“…However, the collective effects induced by high-current charged-particle beams could alter significantly the projected range, the magnitude of energy deposition, and therefore change the requirements for ignition correspondingly. Besides, in the cases of ion beam-driven inertial confinement fusion and high-energy density science, which require ultrahigh beam intensity from accelerators 15 – 19 , no collective effects on ion stopping processes due to high beam intensity are considered nor—to the best of our knowledge—were they reported in any previous experiments.…”

The Relevance of Electronic Perturbations in the Warm Dense Electron Gas

“…Understanding transient states in warm dense matter (WDM) is one of the grand challenges of plasma physics that is currently being tackled in a number of experimental facilities [1][2][3][4] . In these experiments, WDM is generated, for example, due to laser-induced shock compression [5][6][7] .…”

Direct Acceleration of an Annular Attosecond Electron Slice Driven by Near-Infrared Laguerre–Gaussian Laser

“…With the rapid development of ultra-short ultra-intense laser technology, the laser intensity can be increased up to 10 22 W/cm 2 in petawatt laser facilities [1][2][3][4] . Such laser pulses can be used to apply extremely high electromagnetic fields to accelerate electron beams to gigaelectronvolt levels [5,6] . Thus far, two main accelerating mechanisms have been proposed: direct laser acceleration (DLA) [7] and indirect laser acceleration (ILA) [8][9][10][11] .…”