Tom Katsouleas
Dept. of Electrical Engineering -
Electrophysics, USC
October 9, 2000
Advanced accelerator research is crucial to the future of high-energy particle physics. Fortunately there have been a plethora of ideas and a great deal of progress on making accelerators that are more compact and economical than the mega-circular colliders and multi-kilometer linacs at the frontier of high energy physics today. This talk will review the status of advanced accelerator research around the world including ideas using laser-drivers and plasma wakefields and the prospect for "high-energy physics on a tabletop." A collaborative USC/UCLA/SLAC experiment on the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center linac will be featured. In addition to setting a record for energy gain in a plasma wakefield device, this experiment has explored a number of rich new beam physics phenomena. One such phenomenon is the apparent "refraction" and total internal reflection of particles at a boundary between gas and plasma. The results have implications for carrying electricity in "vapor wires" that are the analog of fiber optics for light.