München 2006 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 59: Instrumentation und Anwendungen

HK 59.2: Vortrag

Freitag, 24. März 2006, 14:30–14:45, H

High-Intensity lasers in nuclear physics: towards a γ-Free-Electron-Laser — •Florian Grüner, Stefan Becker, Ulrich Schramm, and Dieter Habs — Am Coulombwall 1, 85748 Garching

Last year three different groups have demonstrated the acceleration of electrons to relativistic energies with laser-plasma accelerators. In this scheme a Terawatt laser pulse is focused onto a gas-jet, building up a "bubble"-shaped cavity which moves close to the speed of light and accelerates trapped electrons. With future Petawatt lasers it should be possible to generate GeV electrons. The key features of the thus produced electron beams is their high current (of up to 500kA in 10 fs) and high density (of up to 10²⁰ cm⁻³). Our group plans to feed a free-electron-laser (FEL) with such electrons to realize a table-top X-ray FEL (TT-XFEL). The electron beam parameters make it possible to even go to much lower wavelengths than the ones of an XFEL. Thus, in contrast to the large-scale world-wide planned XFELs we think that in further future we could realize a γ-FEL delivering an ultra-brilliant beam of MeV-photons. Such a beam could be used for generating low-energy neutrons by the nuclear photo effect. We expect those micro-neutron beams to have a much larger brilliance than the macro-neutron beams generated in reactors by fission and subsequent moderation. This would enable, with an unprecedented accuracy, neutron diffraction, which is complementary to X-ray diffraction due to its sensitivity on hydrogen.
Supported by DFG (TR18)