Critical Components/Enabling Technologies for High-gradient Particle Accelerators

In this SBIR solicitation, critical technology is sought that will enable construction of accelerator systems that are operable from moving military platforms or that will significantly reduce the overall footprint of currently available technology. Alameda Applied Sciences Corporation (AASC) offers to develop one key enabling technology of a Laser Wakefield Accelerator (LWFA), that holds promise to deliver a photo-fission source for active interrogation from a mobile platform. The enabling technology is an ultra-fast gas jet that serves as a target for an LWFA, which in turn produces electron bunches of narrow energy spread and divergence. When a pulsed laser interacts via Thompson scattering with these ~0.1-1GeV electron bunches, a low-divergence, narrow energy bandwidth, ~6-15MeV gamma ray accelerator is produced. Such collimated gamma ray bursts may be used for active interrogation of SNM from large stand-off distances, with lower dose, greater portability and better detection performance than other active interrogation approaches.