Expanding Nuclear Physics Horizons with the Gamma Factory
Dmitry Budker🇩🇪 · Julian C. Berengut🇦🇺 · Victor V. Flambaum🇦🇺 · Mikhail Gorchtein🇩🇪 · Junlan Jin🇨🇳 · Felix Karbstein🇩🇪 · Mieczyslaw Witold Krasny🇫🇷 · Yuri A. Litvinov🇩🇪 · Adriana Pálffy🇩🇪 · Vladimir Pascalutsa🇩🇪 · Alexey Petrenko🇷🇺 · Andrey Surzhykov🇩🇪 and 4 other authors
The Gamma Factory (GF) is an ambitious proposal, currently explored within the CERN Physics Beyond Colliders program, for a source of photons with energies up to MeV and photon fluxes (up to photons per second) exceeding those of the currently available gamma sources by orders of magnitude. The high-energy (secondary) photons are produced via resonant scattering of the primary laser photons by highly relativistic partially-stripped ions circulating in the accelerator. The secondary photons are emitted in a narrow cone and the energy of the beam can be monochromatized, eventually down to the ppm level, via collimation, at the expense of the photon flux. This paper surveys the new opportunities that may be afforded by the GF in nuclear physics and related fields.