Nanometric Wakefield Acceleration

Explorations beyond the energy and intensity frontier have driven fundamental discoveries as well as technological innovations. Accessing new phenomena is however unviable without advances in field strengths accessible for particle acceleration.  A breakthrough in accessible fields conceived in 1979 by Tajima and Dawson has now led to the successful demonstration of many GV/m fields that are sustained by collective electron oscillation wakefields in gaseous plasmas. These GV/m wakefields have been made possible by the Nobel recognized CPA lasers and particle bunch compression technology. While GV/m micro wakefields have shown remarkable progress, two decades of technological breakthroughs in compression techniques have now kindled the transformative possibility of TV/m nano accelerators. In this talk I will elucidate my TV/m Acceleration Gradients in Material Architectures (TAGiMA) initiative with the overarching goal to determine if it is possible to access TV/m wakefields of nanometric collective electron oscillations in architected materials to eventually realize “TeV on a chip”? My work initially seeks modules that offer many GeV energy gain in sub-millimeter nanostructures using attosecond thin film compression x-ray lasers or particle beams. This also breaks open several unexplored basic questions such as understanding attosecond dynamics in materials, properties of nanoscale modes in structured materials etc.