Team Members: Talya Isaacs, Alon Reich

Supervisors / Mentors: Dr. Roy Shiloh

 

Particle accelerators today are large and costly, limiting their accessibility. Dielectric Laser Accelerators (DLAs) use ultrafast laser pulses to accelerate electrons within nanophotonic structures, offering a miniaturized alternative to traditional systems and achieving acceleration gradients orders of magnitude higher than radio frequency (RF) based systems. This technology could enable chip-scale accelerators for scientific, industrial, and medical applications.

In our project, we are designing an optical system that focuses an ultrafast laser pulse on a nanophotonic accelerating structure. To achieve this, we use a blazed grating to generate a pulse front tilt (PFT) for optimizing electron interaction, a cylindrical zoom lens system to compress the vertical beam size and integrated diagnostic tools to measure the PFT and ensure precise alignment. This system is a fundamental requirement for research into nanophotonic dielectric laser accelerators and will be the heart of the optical setup used to explore them. It will enable groundbreaking science and applications in future photon-electron quantum research and potentially lead to minimally invasive medical treatment devices.