Abstract:

In the 20th century, research tools based on accelerators has been growing in both sizes and their impact on science. This fact is evident in large scale colliders for particle physics and light sources for fundamental research in very broad fields. With the emerging and maturing of a new acceleration technology based on plasmas, the overall landscape could be changed, or could they? This new technology, named plasma based wakefield acceleration, can accelerate charged particles with more than 1000 times larger gradient with great beam quality, therefore it can shrink a kilometer scale monster onto a tabletop toy. In this talk, the basic concepts and recent progresses in this field will be reviewed, and a vision for building future light sources and colliders will be shared and discussed.