UCLA, Los Angeles, California
Recent experiments on beam-driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration has shown spectacular results- that 42 GeV electrons can be made to double their energy in less than one meter using collective fields in a plasma. Simulations have shown that it is possible to not only obtain high energy gains but also to have small energy spread and emittances needed for a future collider application from such a device. Furthermore the overall energy extraction efficiency from the drive beam to the accelerating beam can be made to be very high. It is the purpose of the FACET facility now under construction at SLAC to address these critical issues in the next five years. Based on the luminosity requirements of high energy physicists for a 1 TeV CM electron-positron collider, a strawman design study of a plasma wakefield accelerator linear collider (PWFA-LC) has been carried out. This talk will review the the results obtained to-date, the proposed upcoming program on FACET and discuss the roadmap for a PWFA-LC.
Work done in collaboration with colleagues from SLAC experiments E157,162,164 and 167.
