David Turk, second-ranking official at the Department of Energy, toured ATAP’s Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center during his November 3, 2021 visit to Berkeley Lab. ATAP staff briefed him on the BELLA Center’s work to create a new generation of particle accelerators that are much more compact than conventional ones by using ultra-intense lasers to drive plasma waves. Topics included kBELLA, a proposed next-generation laser facility, and coherent beam combining, a candidate for one of kBELLA’s key enabling technologies. kBELLA would help make laser-plasma accelerators useful for applications.
Photography by Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab.
“It was an honor to showcase our facilities and explain how the the Division’s research benefits society,” said ATAP Director Cameron Geddes.
Supplying high average power at the eponymous repetition rate of a thousand pulses per second, or a kilohertz (compared to present-day high-power lasers like the BELLA Petawatt, which fire a pulse per second), kBELLA will be able to drive the next generation of laser- plasma accelerators. This will open up their many applications, ranging from biomedical treatment to light sources for fundamental research and national security. Such lasers will also enable new industrial processes that create and measure the properties of materials needed for advanced manufacturing, energy storage, and carbon management.
To learn more…
See more of the Berkeley Lab endeavors that Deputy Secretary Turk visited.
Visit the kBELLA pages on the BELLA Center website.