The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has started to assemble a new facility for revolutionary accelerator technologies that could make future accelerators 100 to 1000 times smaller and boost their capabilities.

The project is an upgrade to the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET), a DOE Office of Science user facility that operated from 2011 to 2016. FACET-II will produce beams of highly energetic electrons like its predecessor, but with even better quality. These beams will primarily be used to develop plasma acceleration techniques, which could lead to next-generation particle colliders that enhance our understanding of nature’s fundamental particles and forces, and novel X-ray lasers that provide us with unparalleled views of ultrafast processes in the atomic world around us.

FACET-II will be a unique facility that will help keep the US at the forefront of accelerator science, says SLAC’s Vitaly Yakimenko, project director. “Its high-quality beams will enable us to develop novel acceleration methods. In particular, those studies will bring us close to turning plasma acceleration into actual scientific applications.”

The DOE has now approved the $26 million project. The new facility, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2019, will also operate as an Office of Science user facility—a federally sponsored facility for advanced accelerator research available on a competitive, peer-reviewed basis to scientists from around the world.

“As a strategically important national user facility, FACET-II will allow us to explore the feasibility and applications of plasma-driven accelerator technology,” says James Siegrist, associate director of the High Energy Physics program of DOE’s Office of Science, which stewards advanced accelerator R&D in the US for the development of applications in science and society. “We’re looking forward to seeing the groundbreaking science in this area that FACET-II promises, with the potential for significant reduction of the size and cost of future accelerators, including free-electron lasers and medical accelerators.”

Bruce Dunham, head of SLAC’s Accelerator Directorate, says, “Our lab was built on accelerator technology and continues to push innovations in the field. We’re excited to see FACET-II move forward.”

Surfing the plasma wake

The new facility will build on the successes of FACET, where scientists already demonstrated that the plasma technique can very efficiently boost the energy of electrons and their antimatter particles, positrons. In this method, researchers send a bunch of very energetic particles through a hot ionized gas, or plasma, creating a plasma wake for a trailing bunch to “surf” on and gain energy.