UCLA, Los Angeles, California
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
USC, Los Angeles, California
Given the recent success of >GV/m dielectric wakefield accelerator (DWA) breakdown experiments at SLAC, and follow-on coherent Cerenkov radiation production at the UCLA Neptune, a UCLA-USC-SLAC collaboration is now implementing a new set of experiments that explore various DWA scenarios. These experiments are motivated by the opportunities presented by the approval of FACET facility at SLAC, as well as unique pulse-train wakefield drivers at BNL. The SLAC experiments permit further exploration of the multi-GeV/m envelope in DWAs, and will entail investigations of novel materials (e.g. CVD diamond) and geometries (Bragg cylindrical structures, slab-symmetric DWAs), and have an over-riding goal of demonstrating >GeV acceleration in ~33 cm DWA tubes. In the nearer term before FACET's commissioning, we are planning measurements at the BNL ATF, in which we drive ~50-200 MV/m fields with single pulses or pulse trains. These experiments are of high relevance to enhancing linear collider DWA designs, as they will demonstrate potential for high efficiency operatio with pulse trains.
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
INFN/LNF, Frascati (Roma)
Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania
USC, Los Angeles, California
Recent initiatives at UCLA concerning ultra-short, GeV electron beam generation have been aimed at achieving sub-fs pulses capable of driving X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) in single-spike mode. This uses of very low charge beams, which may allow existing FEL injectors to produce few-100 attosecond pulses, with very high brightness. Towards this end, recent experiments at the Stanford X-ray FEL (LCLS, first of its kind, built with essential UCLA leadership) have produced ~2 fs, 20 pC electron pulses. We discuss here extensions of this work, in which we seek to exploit the beam brightness in FELs, in tandem with new developments at UCLA in cryogenic undulator technology, to create compact accelerator/undulator systems that can lase below 0.15 Angstroms, or be used to permit 1.5 Angstrom operation at 4.5 GeV. In addition, we are now developing experiments which use the present LCLS fs pulses to excite plasma wakefields exceeding 1 TV/m, permitting a table-top TeV accelerator for frontier high energy physics applications.