Gamma Factory

At the core of the Gamma Factory (GF) proposal was the identification of an enormous, but thus far hidden, potential of the CERN accelerator infrastructure in conducting a new research programme at the crossroads of fundamental, particle, nuclear, atomic, and applied physics. All these disciplines could jointly profit from the novel research tools which can be created by the Gamma Factory facility. The key GF idea is to produce, accelerate, and store highly relativistic atomic beams in the LHC rings — acting as effective atomic traps — and to resonantly excite the atomic degrees of freedom of the beam particles by laser photons to: (1) cool atomic beams, and (2) produce high-energy, polarised photon beams. Their intensity can be, in the particularly interesting gamma-ray energy domain, higher than those of the presently operating light sources by at least seven orders of magnitude. Photons in this energy range are proposed to be used to produce unprecedented-intensity tertiary beams of polarised electrons, polarised positrons, polarised muons, neutrinos, neutrons, and radioactive ions. The LHC atomic traps, the laser-cooled nuclear beams, the high-intensity, polarised photon beams, and the tertiary beams constitute the principal research tools of the proposed GF facility.