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TY - UNPB AU - Pomerantz, I. ED - Yamazaki, Yoshishige ED - Facco, Alberto ED - McCausey, Amy ED - Schaa, Volker RW TI - Reaching Beyond Conventional Accelerator Capabilities with Laser-Plasma Ion Accelerators J2 - Proc. of LINAC2016, East Lansing, MI, USA, 25-30 September 2016 C1 - East Lansing, MI, USA T2 - Linear Accelerator Conference T3 - 28 LA - english AB - For the past few decades, nuclear research has been exclusive to large accelerator and reactor facilities. The availability of tabletop particle sources based on high intensity lasers opens venues for new research methods in nuclear physics, both at large facilities and at university-scale laboratories. It has been demonstrated in many experiments that the kinetic energy of a particle radiated by a high intensity laser-plasma interaction is sufficient to induce nuclear reactions. These achievements, however, duplicated experimental results achieved decades ago with conventional accelerator. While often smaller and cheaper, laser systems to-date have shown no technical advantage over conventional accelerators. This talk will review the state-of-the-art in laser-ion acceleration, and discuss how next generation laser systems can go beyond conventional accelerator capabilities. Specifically, the talk will present a novel, ultrashort pulsed laser-driven neutron generator developed at U. Texas (I. Pomerantz et al., Ultrashort pulsed neutron source, Phys. Rev. Lett 2014, 113:184801), generating a peak flux of 10¹⁸ n/cm²/s, thus exceeding any other pulsed or CW neutron source. PB - JACoW CP - Geneva, Switzerland ER -