Fibre lasers to boost accelerator efficiency

According to the project, while laser particle acceleration is a potentially revolutionary technology, there are issues regarding efficiency and repetition rates. The lasers used currently consume too much power and can only generate the pulses required to produce acceleration around once per second. Because many applications need higher repetition rates, this makes the use of lasers uneconomic and restricts their application. However, a team from the International Coherent Amplification Network (ICAN) believes fibre lasers may overcome the problems. Not only can fibre lasers operate at very high average powers, they can also produce pulses at kHz rates. This is said to improve overall power efficiency by a factor of 1000, making them more economically feasible for experiments. However, optical non linearities in the fibre limit the amount of energy that can be delivered; something which rules out fibre lasers for use in high energy physics. Dr Bill Brocklesby, from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, is ICAN's project manager. He said: "High energy ultrafast lasers have been demonstrated, but the challenge to produce high energy ultrafast pulses at high rates is a speciality for ORC. "Our track record in the development and fabrication of new optical fibres is unparalleled." The ICAN project involves four main laboratories: ORC; Ecole Polytechnique; Fraunhofer IOF; and CERN. It also includes partners from the laser, fibre and high energy physics communities.