The organizers of the 2020 Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop (AAC2020) have canceled this year’s event due to an abundance of caution surrounding the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. This difficult decision was taken with the well-being of our colleagues, staff, and the local community foremost.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your interest in AAC2020. We will be in touch as we learn more in this rapidly evolving situation that affects us all.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is unable to reimburse travel expenses, including any cancellation or change fees; please work with your home institution for this.
Wishing you the best of health in the coming months,
Eric Esarey, Chair, AAC2020
Working Group 1 (WG1) will focus on the acceleration of electrons and positrons using laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs). Work on developing LPAs are motivated by two major applications: high energy physics (HEP) colliders at the TeV scale and compact light sources. The path from recent results towards achieving high-quality beams required for these applications will be discussed.
Contributors are encouraged to present laser-plasma physics, simulations, and experiments that address the following topics, which will be the organizing themes for arranging working group discussions.
Joint sessions with other working groups will be arranged based on contributions.
The recent advances on experiments, which now provide measurements with unprecedented detail and the access to new experimental layouts, in conjunction with greater computing resources, enabling realistic three-dimensional modelling with new physics models, pose new questions to numerical simulations of advanced accelerators. The goal for this working group is to understand the state-of-the art of simulation codes in this context. In particular, in this group we aim to review and discuss the following:
Participants are encouraged to address their recent contributions to these topics in their presentations and, in the spirit of this workshop, to actively participate in the questions and answers that will follow them.
The purpose of Working Group 3 is to discuss recent advances in externally-powered structure-based accelerators, both laser and rf driven. The capability to accelerate particles at higher accelerating gradients and efficiencies is essential for reduction of size and cost of future accelerators for science and industry. This includes the future multi-TeV e+e- collider for High Energy Physics, free-electron lasers (FELs) for Basic Energy Sciences and National Security, industrial accelerators for Energy and Environmental Applications, and accelerators for other applications (direct material investigation, medical field, nanotechnology, etc.).
The working group welcomes presentations on the following topics:
The group will also try to address specific issues such as novel structure-beam interaction schemes (IFEL, undulator-mediated, etc.), high efficiency electromagnetic power source development, optimizing novel accelerating structures using advanced algorithms, beam dynamics and collective effects associated with reduced beam apertures, optimizing power coupling schemes to the structures, increasing wall-plug-to-beam efficiency, and integrated particle source designs.
This working group examines plasma- and structure-based beam-driven wakefield acceleration. The overarching goal of the WG4 is to provide a platform to discuss recent development on the various topics relevant to beam-driven acceleration (both in the collinear and two-beam configurations). In particular, our group will discuss:
The working group will include discussions on theoretical and numerical-simulation developments along with experiment results and plans.
WG 5 will address the three subjects in its title:
We invite presentations, both theoretical and experimental, in the above areas as well as related subjects. We will discuss the state-of-the-art in these topics and we will try to identify the challenges that need to be addressed to further advance the field. Results of this assessment will be presented during the close out session of the workshop and in the written working group summary. Joint sessions with other WGs on the topics of beam generation, diagnostics and control may be scheduled.
Laser-driven ion acceleration has applications in advanced accelerators, nuclear fusion, medicine, radiography, and to drive novel states of high energy density matter. Many of these applications require ion bunches with high energy, narrow spectra, and low emittance, and, in principle, laser-based ion accelerators can achieve these ion beam properties at significantly lower cost and greater compactness than conventional accelerators. In recent years, advances in ultra-high power and high-intensity lasers, modern pulse cleaning techniques, methods for spatially and temporally manipulating short laser pulses, higher repetition rates, novel target fabrication approaches, new computing paradigms, and increasing computing power have enabled major developments in the capabilities of ion beams and the understanding of the underlying acceleration physics.
In this working group, we will discuss the highlights of recent experiments and simulations in laser-ion generation showing progress towards increased efficiency, charge, and precision tailoring of the spectrum. We will review the recent results across a number of acceleration schemes, and the challenges that remain to be addressed as we develop these ion beams toward specific applications.
We invite both theoretical and experimental presentations addressing the above areas as well as other related topics.
Accelerator-based light sources have opened new frontiers in radiation brilliance, tunability, power, and wavelength and are among the world’s most productive scientific instruments. As advanced-acceleration techniques mature, it is time to explore the achievable performance for light source applications.
We encourage participants to contribute work on radiation generation with charged-particle beams, particularly when the beam is driven by an advanced-accelerator technique. Areas of interest include betatron radiation emitted by electron beams oscillating in a plasma-ion field, undulator radiation, progresses towards a plasma-based free-electron laser, Compton and Thomson scattering, and Bremsstrahlung. The generation of radiation with unique properties such as ultra-short pulses, polarization control, multi-color radiation, and applications of these radiation sources is also of interest.
Finally, advanced concepts that enable improved beam performance, particularly for radiation applications, are also of interest. These include phase-space manipulation and cooling, advanced beam dynamics, and novel configurations or architectures.
The primary focus of working group 8 will be the laser and beam technologies required for novel accelerators. Both laser-driven and beam-driven efforts will require orders of magnitude improvement to produce future particle colliders. Advancements in technologies and requirements for these future novel accelerators will be of primary importance. Many new facility and experimental capabilities are emerging for users world-wide. We would like to hear about how new experimental capabilities in these facilities will improve our data quality and understanding of the laser- and beam-driven accelerator physics. This can include new experimental, data acquisition and analysis techniques, new diagnostic and stabilization methods, monitoring of facility performance including feedback and machine learning applications, and lessons learned from facilities developing these new, never-before accessed parameter spaces.
Lasers play an important role in advanced accelerator research and technology, from driving novel accelerators — high peak and average power lasers for LWFA, hybrid plasma acceleration schemes, DLA, ion acceleration, vacuum acceleration — to tools as diagnostics for the specialized charged particle bunches produced by advanced accelerators and sources for the fs-level jitter synchronization that will be needed for future facilities. WG8 welcomes submissions on the technologies required to achieve the required laser parameters for all these goals. All proposed architectures are of interest, including improvements in beam quality, pulse fidelity, efficiency, stability, and robustness. We would like to discuss these advances in laser and beam drivers and the supporting technologies required to achieve them, with a focus on how these new technologies will affect the quality of the particle beams produced.