I always wondered why there is so little study/progress on plasma Wakefield acceleration, given that there’s such a need of more and more powerful accelerator to study presently unaccessible energy regions. Is that because there’s a fundamental limit which cannot be used to create giant plasma based accelerator or it’s just a poorly explored avenue?
Sorry, I missed your post. As shminux says, new concepts take time to mature; the first musket was a much poorer weapon than the last crossbow. Then you have to consider that this sort of engineering problem tends intrinsically to move a bit slower than areas that can be advanced by data analysis. Tweaking your software is faster than taking a screwdriver to your prototype, and can be done even by freshly-minted grad students with no particular risk of turning a million dollars of equipment into very expensive and slightly radioactive junk. It is of course possible for an inexperienced grad student to wipe out his local copy of the data which he has filtered using his custom software, and have to redo the filtering (example is completely hypothetical and certainly nothing to do with me), thus costing himself a week of work and the experiment a week of computer-farm time. But that is tolerable. For engineering work you want experienced folk.
I’m not an experimental physicist, but from what I know, the whole concept is relatively new and it takes time to get it to the point where it can compete with the technologies that had been perfected over many decades. With the groups at SLAC, CERN and Max Planck Institute (among others) working on it, we should expect to see some progress within a decade or so.
I always wondered why there is so little study/progress on plasma Wakefield acceleration, given that there’s such a need of more and more powerful accelerator to study presently unaccessible energy regions. Is that because there’s a fundamental limit which cannot be used to create giant plasma based accelerator or it’s just a poorly explored avenue?
Sorry, I missed your post. As shminux says, new concepts take time to mature; the first musket was a much poorer weapon than the last crossbow. Then you have to consider that this sort of engineering problem tends intrinsically to move a bit slower than areas that can be advanced by data analysis. Tweaking your software is faster than taking a screwdriver to your prototype, and can be done even by freshly-minted grad students with no particular risk of turning a million dollars of equipment into very expensive and slightly radioactive junk. It is of course possible for an inexperienced grad student to wipe out his local copy of the data which he has filtered using his custom software, and have to redo the filtering (example is completely hypothetical and certainly nothing to do with me), thus costing himself a week of work and the experiment a week of computer-farm time. But that is tolerable. For engineering work you want experienced folk.
Nice turn of phrase there.
It’s a growing field. One of my roommates is working on plasma waveguides, a related technology.
I’m not an experimental physicist, but from what I know, the whole concept is relatively new and it takes time to get it to the point where it can compete with the technologies that had been perfected over many decades. With the groups at SLAC, CERN and Max Planck Institute (among others) working on it, we should expect to see some progress within a decade or so.