Artificial intelligence improves control of powerful plasma accelerators

IMAGE: The gas cell used as a plasma source. The laser arrives from the right of these images through the metal cone and enters the little cube, which is filled with... view more Researchers have used AI to control beams for the next generation of smaller, cheaper accelerators for research, medical and industrial applications. Experiments led by Imperial College London researchers, using the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Central Laser Facility (CLF), showed that an algorithm was able to tune the complex parameters involved in controlling the next generation of plasma-based particle accelerators. The algorithm was able to optimize the accelerator much more quickly than a human operator, and could even outperform experiments on similar laser systems. These accelerators focus the energy of the world's most powerful lasers down to a spot the size of a skin cell, producing electrons and x-rays with equipment a fraction of the size of conventional accelerators.