Lasers and new methods of particle acceleration

There has been a great progress in development of high power laser technology. Harnessing their potential for particle acceleratorsis a challenge and of great interest for development of future high energy colliders. The author discusses some of the advances and new methods of accelerationincluding plasma-based accelerators. The exponential increase in sophistication and power of all aspects of acceleratordevelopment and operation that has been demonstrated has been remarkable. This success has been driven by the inherent interest to gain new and deeper understanding of the universe around us. With the limitations of the conventional technology it may not be possible to meet the requirements of the future acceleratorswith demands for higher and higher energies and luminosities. It is believed that using the existing technology one can build a linear collider with about 1 TeV center of mass energy. However, it would be very difficult (or impossible) to build linear colliders with energies much above one or two TeV without a new method of acceleration. Laser driven high gradient acceleratorsare becoming more realistic and is expected to provide an alternative, (more compact, and more economical), to conventional acceleratorsin the future. The author discusses some of the new methods of particle acceleration, including laser and particle beamdriven plasma based accelerators, nearand far field accelerators. He also discusses the enhanced IFEL (Inverse Free Electron Laser) and NAIBEA (Nonlinear Amplification of Inverse-Beamstrahlung Electron Acceleration) schemes, laser driven photo-injector and the high energy physics requirements.