• W. An, C. Huang, W. Lu, W.B. Mori
  UCLA, Los Angeles, California
• T.C. Katsouleas
  Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Plasma Wake Field Accelerator (PWFA) has a very attractive accelerating gradient which can be three orders of magnitude higher than that of the traditional accelerator. In this paper the positron acceleration in a particle beam driven PWFA is studied both in the linear and weakly nonlinear region by using Particle In Cell (PIC) simulation. A preliminary parameters design is obtained for such acceleration scheme.

• C. Huang, W. An, C.E. Clayton, C. Joshi, W. Lu, K.A. Marsh, W.B. Mori, M. Tzoufras
  UCLA, Los Angeles, California
• I. Blumenfeld, M.J. Hogan, N.A. Kirby, T.O. Raubenheimer, A. Seryi
  SLAC, Menlo Park, California
• T.C. Katsouleas
  Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
• P. Muggli
  USC, Los Angeles, California

Funding: Work supported by DOE under contracts DE-FG03-92ER40727, DE-FG52-06NA26195, DE-FC02-07ER41500, DE-FG02-03ER54721.

Recent Plasma Wake-Field Acceleration (PWFA) experiments at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center has demonstrated electron acceleration from 42GeV to 84GeV in less than one meter long plasma section. The accelerating gradient is above 50GeV/m, which is three orders of magnitude higher than those in current state-of-art RF linac. Further experiments are also planned with the goal of achieving acceleration of a witness bunch with high efficiency and good quality. Such PWFA sections with 25 GeV energy gain will be the building blocks for a staged TeV electron-positron linear collider concept based on PWFA (PWFA-LC). We conduct Particle-In-Cell simulations of these PWFA sections at both the initial and final witness beam energies. Different design options, such as Gaussian and shaped bunch profiles, self-ionized and pre-ionized plasmas, optimal bunch separation and plasma density are explored. Theoretical analysis of the beam-loading* in the blow-out regime of PWFA and simulation results show that highly efficient PWFA stages are possible. The simulation needs, code developments and preliminary simulation results for future collider parameters will be discussed.

*M. Tzoufras et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. {10}1, 145002 (2008).

• W. Lu, W. An, C. Huang, C. Joshi, W.B. Mori
  UCLA, Los Angeles, California
• M.J. Hogan, T.O. Raubenheimer, A. Seryi
  SLAC, Menlo Park, California

Funding: Work supported by DOE grant numbers: DE-FG03-92ER40727, DE-FG52-06NA26195, DE-FC02-07ER41500, DE-FG02-03ER54721

The fourth generation of light sources (such as LCLS and the XFEL) require high energy electron drivers (16-20GeV) of very high quality. We are exploring the possibility of using a high transformer ratio PWFA to meet these challenging requirements. This may have the potential to reduce the size of the electron drivers by a factor of 5 or more, therefore making these light source much smaller and more affordable. In our design, a high charge (5-10nC) low energy driver (1-3GeV) with an elongated current profile is used to drive a plasma wake in the blowout regime with a high transformer ratio (5 or more). A second ultra-short beam that has high quality and low charge beam (1nC) can be loaded into the wake at a proper phase and be accelerated to high energy (5-15GeV) in very short distances (10s of cms). The parameters can be optimized, such that high quality (0.1% energy spread and 1mm mrad normalized emittance) and high efficiency (60-80%) can be simultaneously achieved. The major obstacle for achieving the above goals is the electron hosing instabilities in the blowout regime. In this poster, we will use both theoretical analysis and PIC simulations to study this concept.