CAREER: Coherent Laser Control for Compact Accelerators

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This CAREER award will support a study of how to enhance performance of laser-driven particle accelerators by controlling laser properties such as the focal spot quality. Using techniques that enable the laser light to be manipulated and coherently controlled, high brightness compact accelerators may become achievable on a single tabletop, with immediate applications in medical isotope production and radiography. The research is highly integrated with mentoring, professional development, and outreach, which are employed to train students practical skill sets to prepare them for a range of technical careers. The education plan will utilize culturally relevant frameworks for engaging underrepresented populations, providing hands-on skill set development, and empowering the students themselves to increase visibility of accelerator science as a discipline. Femtosecond lasers are ideally suited for use as tabletop particle accelerators since their short pulse duration enables relativistic intensities to be generated at high repetition rates. With sufficient intensity, a laser can redistribute electrons within optical cycles, generating enormous acceleration gradients which can drive advanced accelerators. Though early analytical models showed promise of GeV ions and hundreds of GeV electrons, experiments have yet to produce such beams. This CAREER award will enable experiments shaping the wavefront and modifying the polarization of femtosecond lasers towards development of practical tabletop accelerators. Influence of higher order modes for increased charge and decreased beam divergence will be studied, with machine learning providing insight into the respective influence of each mode in these highly nonlinear regimes. Numerical modeling of the interactions will be performed utilizing large data samples and exactly measured beam properties.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.