Technique could lead to significantly higher power proton beams used to answer tough scientific questions

Many large-scale accelerators deliver short, powerful pulses of proton beams. Creating the beams involves accumulating multiple lower power beam pulses to produce a single high-power beam pulse. Today, the achievable proton beam powers are limited by the technology used to merge the incoming pulses into a final beam pulse. To resolve this limitation, scientists demonstrated a new technique, called laser stripping. The approach uses a high-power laser and two magnets.