📋 Tender Overview
Staging Of Plasma Accelerators For Realizing Timely Applications
Funded Under
European Research Council (Erc)
Total Cost
€ 1 499 368,00
Eu Contribution
€ 1 499 368,00
Coordinated By
Universitetet I Oslo
Norway
Objective
High-energy physics is headed for an impasse: the next particle collider will cost several billion euros, and while designs have been ready for a decade, they are so expensive that no host country has come forward—a problem that will soon impact progress in the field.
Plasma acceleration is a novel technology promising to fix this issue—with accelerating fields 1000 times larger than in conventional machines, the size and cost of future accelerators can be drastically reduced. However, there is a gap between what current plasma accelerators can do and what the next collider requires. Therefore, a recent R&D roadmap (European Strategy for Particle Physics) calls for intensified plasma-accelerator research, as well as an intermediate demonstrator facility.
SPARTA tackles two basic problems in plasma acceleration: to reach high energy by connecting multiple accelerator stages without degrading the accelerated beam, and to do so in a stable manner. Access to stable, high-energy electron beams at a fraction of today’s cost will enable ground-breaking advances in strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED), an important near-term experiment that doubles as a demo facility.
