Over the last Century the method of particle acceleration to high energies has become the prime approach to explore the fundamental nature of matter in laboratory. It appears that the latest search of the contemporary accelerator based on the collide
rs shows a sign of saturation (or at least a slow-down) in increasing its energy and other necessary parameters to extend this frontier. We suggest two pronged approach enabled by the recent progress in high intensity lasers.
With the increasing development of laser accelerators, the electron energy is already beyond GeV and even higher in near future. Conventional beam dump based on ionization or radiation loss mechanism is cumbersome and costly, also has radiological ha
zards. We revisit the stopping power of high-energy charged particles in matter and discuss the associated problem of beam dump from the point of view of collective deceleration. The collective stopping length in an ionized gas can be several orders of magnitude shorter than the Bethe-Bloch and multiple electromagnetic cascades stopping length in solid. At the mean time, the tenuous density of the gas makes the radioactivation negligible. Such a compact and non-radioactivating beam dump works well for short and dense bunches, which is typically generated from laser wakefield accelerator.
