Towards Particle Acceleration in Carbon Nanotube Arrays

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Novel acceleration techniques such as plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) have in recent decades made much progress in producing particle accelerators that are, pound-for-pound, up to a thousand times stronger than conventional radio-frequency accelerators. Extrapolating such techniques to solid-state media could have the potential to produce even more intense and compact “ultra-high” accelerating fields.

QUASAR Group member Aravinda Perera and his colleagues have published a peer-reviewed article in a special IOP journal issue on work presented at the 4th European Advanced Accelerator Concepts workshop (EAAC2019), detailing preliminary work undertaken towards establishing working models of laser and particle-beam interaction with CNTs and CNT arrays.

Schematic 2D plane geometry of a carbon nanotubes (CNT) array simulation model: alternating hollow channels and plasma walls inside a vacuum chamber [1]

In collaboration with Guoxing Xia and Alexandre Bonatto from the Novel Accelerators group at the University of Manchester, the team led by Javier Resta-Lopez from the University of Liverpool use the GPU-accelerated particle-in-cell code PIConGPU to examine laser-CNT interaction. Further, preliminary modifications to an existing code routinely employed to model PWFA, EPOCH, are also presented as a means of more accurately modelling physics of CNT-particle-beam interactions, supported by Monte-Carlo simulations by QUASAR Volodymyr Rodin on structural damage to the CNTs by relativistic beams.

Work on detailed characterization of geometric properties, ionization thresholds, and robustness of the CNT media, as well as accuracy of the physics models used, is ongoing.

[1] J. Resta-Lopez et al, Study of Ultra-High Gradient Acceleration in Carbon Nanotube Arrays, Proceedings of IPAC 2018

 

Further information:

A. Perera, et al, “Towards ultra-high gradient particle acceleration in carbon nanotubes”, J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 1596 012016, 2020

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1596/1/012028