Pulsed High-power Laser Accelerators to Study radiation Hardening (PHLASH)

Objective: Demonstrate a prototype scalable laser driver for electron beam generation and design a 100-GeV system to fit within a 250 m3 footprint. Description: Microelectronic systems designed to operate in space must be tested to ensure they can function reliably in a high radiation environment [3]. Currently such tests are done at large, existing heavy-ion accelerator facilities that cannot meet demand [2]. While heavy ions represent the current gold-standard for single-event effect (SEE) testing [4], a new methodology using small packets of high-energy electrons interacting in a manner that makes them an equivalent surrogate for heavy ions is showing promise. Key to this technology is the need to attain very high electron beam energies at the device under test (DUT) while keeping the electron packet extremely small, = 1µm in the transverse dimension and sub-ps in the longitudinal dimension. High-energy electron accelerators, such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and CERN Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR), could achieve these electron energies, but currently occupy kilometer-scale facilities. For electron accelerators to be viable solutions for radiation testing, they must be designed into compact (<250 m3) systems that could be integrated into a semiconductor fabrication facility and cost a fraction of a classical accelerator-based system. Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA), or laser plasma acceleration (LPA), with its ability to generate high-energy packets of electrons over an acceleration distance 1000-times less than a classical RF-based accelerator system [1], provides a path to this goal. However, the necessary high-pulse-power laser drivers and plasma targets are not available, and the physics of electron beam optimization at such high energies is not fully understood. This solicitation aims to advance the current state of the art to the commercial sector where it can be further vetted and exploited. To this end, the specific goal is to design and build a prototype laser driver to generate 50-MeV electron beam energies at a pulse repetition rate greater-than 100Hz that can be scaled to 100 GeV and 1 kHz, respectively, to meet the needs of future SEE systems. Keywords: High-energy accelerators, Laser Wavefront Accelerators, Laser Plasma Accelerators, Radiation Testing, Electron accelerator