Concluding its EU-supported feasibility study, lead members of the ICAN Consortium discuss a revolutionary laser architecture that could for the first time accelerate particles to very high energy, at high repetition rate with good wall plug efficiency.
This architecture, based for the most part on telecommunication technology, is a watershed in laser physics, unifying in one stroke laser optics, nuclear physics and high energy physics, and providing a rich range of applications for the industrial and medical sectors.
To highlight this new possibility, and illustrating the vitality and leadership of European science, the Ecole Polytechnique, the ORC, the FhG and the CERN have presented a symposium where details of this novel laser architecture were presented. Examples illustrated ICAN's potential, including gamma-gamma, muon colliders, free electron lasers, neutron and neutrino sources but also nuclear waste management and proton therapy.
Find out more about ICAN.