PPPL, Princeton, New Jersey
LLNL, Livermore, California
LBNL, Berkeley, California
Voss Scientific, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Funding: Research supported by the US Department of Energy.
Neutralized drift compression offers an effective means for particle beam focusing and current amplification. In neutralized drift compression, a linear radial and longitudinal velocity drift is applied to a beam pulse, so that the beam pulse compresses as it drifts in the focusing section. The beam intensity can increase more than a factor of 100 in both the radial and longitudinal directions, totaling to more than a 10,000 times increase in the beam density during this process. The optimal configuration of focusing elements to mitigate the time-dependent focal plane is discussed in this paper. The self-electric and self-magnetic fields can prevent tight ballistic focusing and have to be neutralized by supplying neutralizing electrons. This paper presents a survey of the present numerical modeling techniques and theoretical understanding of plasma neutralization of intense particle beams. Investigations of intense beam pulse interaction with a background plasma have identified the operating regimes for stable and neutralized propagation of intense charged particle beams.
LBNL, Berkeley, California
LLNL, Livermore, California
Funding: Supported by the US-DOE under Contracts DE-AC02-05CH11231 and DE-AC52-07NA27344, and a DOD SBIR Phase II. Used resources of NERSC, supported by the US-DOE under Contract DE-AC02-05CH11231.
The development of advanced accelerators often involves the modeling of systems that involve a wide range of scales in space and/or time, which can render such modeling extremely challenging. The Adaptive Mesh Refinement technique can be used to significantly reduce the requirements for computer memory and the number of operations. Its application to the fully self-consistent modeling of beams and plasmas is especially challenging, due to properties of the Vlasov-Maxwell system of equations. Most recently, we have begun to explore the application of AMR to the modeling of laser plasma wakefield accelerators (LWFA). For the simulation of a 10GeV LWFA stage, the wake wavelength is O[100μm] while the electron bunch and laser wavelength are typically submicron in size. As a result, the resolution required for different parts of the problem may vary by more than two orders of magnitude in each direction, corresponding to up to 6 orders of magnitude of possible (theoretical) savings by use of mesh refinement. We present a summary of the main issues and their mitigations, as well as examples of application in the context of LWFA and similar beam-plasma interaction setup.
LLNL, Livermore, California
LBNL, Berkeley, California
Funding: Work performed under the auspices of US Department of Energy by LLNL under Contract DE- AC52-07NA27344 and by LBNL under Contract DE-AC03-76SF00098.
The Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion is developing a physics design for NDCX-II, an experiment to study warm dense matter heated by ions near the Bragg-peak energy. Present plans call for using about thirty induction cells to accelerate 30 nC of Li+ ions to more than 3 MeV, followed by neutralized drift-compression. To heat targets to useful temperatures, the beam must be compressed to a sub-millimeter radius and a duration of about 1 ns. An interactive 1-D particle-in-cell simulation with an electrostatic field solver, acceleation-gap fringe fields, and a library of realizable analytic waveforms has been used for developing NDCX-II acceleration schedules. Multidimensional source-to-final-focus simulations with the particle-in-cell code Warp have validated this 1-D model and have been used both to design transverse focusing and to compensate for injection non-uniformities and 3-D effects. Results from this work are presented, and ongoing work to replace the analytic waveforms with output from circuit models is discussed.
LBNL, Berkeley, California
TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt
GSI, Darmstadt
LLNL, Livermore, California
Ion acceleration from high-intensity, short-pulse laser irradiated thin foils has attracted much attention during the past decade. The emitted ion and, in particular, proton pulses contain large particle numbers (exceeding a trillion particles) with energies in the multi-MeV range and are tightly confined in time (< ps) and space (source radius a few micrometers). The generation of these high-current beams is a promising new area of research and has motivated pursuit of applications such as tabletop proton sources or pre-accelerators. Requirements for an injector are controllability, reproducibility and a narrow (quasi-monoenergetic) energy. However, the source provides a divergent beam with an exponential energy spectrum that exhibits a sharp cutoff at its maximum energy. The laser and plasma physics group of the TU Darmstadt, in collaboration with GSI and LBNL, is studying possibilities for transport and RF capture in conventional accelerator structures. First results on controlling laser-accelerated proton beams are presented, supported by WARP simulations.