Reconfigurable Photonic Circuit for Controlled Power Delivery to Laser-Driven Accelerators on a Chip

Dielectric laser acceleration (DLA) represents a promising approach to building miniature particle accelerators on a chip. However, similar to conventional rf accelerators, an automatic and reconfigurable control mechanism is needed to scale DLA technology towards high-energy gains and practical applications. We propose a system providing control of the laser coupling to DLA using integrated optics and introduce a component for power distribution using a reconfigurable mesh of Mach-Zehnder interferometers. Using numerical simulations, we show how such a mesh may be sequentially and efficiently tuned to optimize power distribution in the circuit and find that this strategy has favorable scaling properties with respect to size of the mesh.