On-chip integrated laser-driven particle accelerator
Abstract
Particle accelerators represent an indispensable tool in science and industry. However, the size and cost of conventional radio-frequency accelerators limit the utility and reach of this technology. Dielectric laser accelerators (DLAs) provide a compact and cost-effective solution to this problem by driving accelerator nanostructures with visible or near-infrared (NIR) pulsed lasers, resulting in a 10 reduction of scale. Current implementations of DLAs rely on free-space lasers directly incident on the accelerating structures, limiting the scalability and integrability of this technology. Here we present the first experimental demonstration of a waveguide-integrated DLA, designed using a photonic inverse design approach. These on-chip devices accelerate sub-relativistic electrons of initial energy 83.4 keV by 1.21 keV over 30 um, providing peak acceleration gradients of 40.3 MeV/m. This progress represents a significant step towards a completely integrated MeV-scale dielectric laser accelerator.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1905.12822,
title = {On-chip integrated laser-driven particle accelerator},
author = {Neil V. Sapra and Ki Youl Yang and Dries Vercruysse and Kenneth J. Leedle and Dylan S. Black and R. Joel England and Logan Su and Yu Miao and Olav Solgaard and Robert L. Byer and Jelena Vučković},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.12822},
year = {2020}
}