I’ve had an ongoing conversion with a few other people about using electromagnetic metamaterials for field enhancement and focusing in a plasma channel. We had

I’ve had an ongoing conversion with a few other people about using electromagnetic metamaterials for field enhancement and focusing in a plasma channel. We had previously worked on optical metamaterials for chemical sensing, and the idea for plasma enhancement was for considering staging and filtering methods for plasma wakefield accelerators in order to generate enough GeV for free electron lasing. The same idea could be used for proton acceleration for fusion. Possibly a concern is heat generated in the material by an accelerated plasma may be incompatible with passive coloumb-mode filtering. We had considered a target might be something like a disposable cartridge similar to other laser fusion designs. A very clever result in wakefield staging (out of the research labs) involves using a VHS tape for sacrificial optical coupling. The 10PW 1ps laser described in the parent post is not practical and would require similar staging methods.