Channeling Acceleration: A Path To Ultrahigh Energy Colliders

Acceleration of charged particles along crystal channels has been proposed earlier in an attempt to achieve high acceleration gradient while at the same time to suppress excessive emittance growth. Recently we demonstrated that a particle in a generic focusing channel can in principle absolutely damp to its transverse ground state without any quantum excitation. This yields the minimum beam emittance that one can ever attain, fl ffl min = ¯h=2mc, limited only by the uncertainty principle. In this paper we discuss sources of excitation when a more realistic channel is considered, including bremsstrahlung and multiple Coulomb scattering. We investigate the possibility of colliding ultrahigh energy particles in such strong focusing channels without the need of a final focusing system, where the concept of luminosity departs from the conventional approach. We show that a high luminosity can be attained with a rather modest beam power. Invited talk presented at the Fourth Tamura Symposium o..