SLAC, Menlo Park, California
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
USC, Los Angeles, California
Funding: Work supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-76SF00515.
Recent progress in generating gradients in the 10's of GV/m range with beam driven plasmas has renewed interest in developing a linear collider based on this technology. This talk will explore possible configurations of such a machine, discuss the key demonstrations and the facilities needed to advance this effort and highlight possible alternative uses of this technology.
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
USC, Los Angeles, California
Funding: Work supported by the DOE under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515.
Plasma Wake-Field Acceleration (PWFA) has demonstrated acceleration gradients above 50 GeV/m. Simulations have shown drive/witness bunch configurations that yield small energy spreads in the accelerated witness bunch and high energy transfer efficiency from the drive bunch to the witness bunch, ranging from 30% for a Gaussian drive bunch to 95% for shaped longitudinal profile. These results open the opportunity for a linear collider that could be compact, efficient and more cost effective that the present microwave technologies. A concept of a PWFA-based Linear Collider (PWFA-LC) has been developed and is described in this paper. The scheme of the drive beam generation and distribution, requirements on the plasma cells, and optimization of the interaction region parameters are described in detail. The research and development steps, necessary for further development of the concept, are also outlined.
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
USC, Los Angeles, California
Funding: Work supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-76SF00515.
An electron beam driven Plasma Wake-Field Accelerator (PWFA) has recently sustained accelerating gradients above 50GeV/m for almost a meter. Future experiments will transition from using a single bunch to both drive and sample the wakefield, to a two bunch configuration that will accelerate a discrete bunch of particles with a narrow energy spread and preserved emittance. The plasma works as an energy transformer to transform high-current, low-energy bunches into relatively lower-current higher-energy bunches. This method is expected to provide high energy transfer efficiency (from 30% up to 95%) from the drive bunch to the accelerated witness bunch. The PWFA has a wide variety of applications and also has the potential to greatly lower the cost of future accelerators. We discuss various possible uses of this technique such as: linac based light sources, injector systems for ring based synchrotron light sources, and for generation of electron beams for high energy electron-hadron colliders.
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
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.
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
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).
USC, Los Angeles, California
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Funding: Work supported by US Department of Energy.
Plasma Wakefield Accelerator has been proven to be a promising technique to lower the cost of the future high energy colliders by offering orders of magnitude higher gradients than the conventional accelerators. However, it has been shown that ion motion is an important issue to account for in the extreme regime of ultra high intensities and ultra low emittances, characteristics of future high energy colliders. In this regime, the transverse electric field of the beam is so high that the plasma ions cannot be considered immobile at the time scale of electron plasma oscillations, thereby leading to a nonlinear focusing force. Therefore, the transverse emittance of a beam matched to the initial linear focusing will not be preserved under these circumstances. However, Vlasov equation predicts a matching profile even in the nonlinear regime. Furthermore, we extend the idea and introduce a plasma section that can match the entire beam to the mobile-ion regime of plasma. We also find the analytic solution for the optimal matching section. Simulation results will be presented.
USC, Los Angeles, California
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York
Funding: Work supported by US Department of Energy.
Current Filamentation Instability, CFI, (or Weibel instability) is of central importance for relativistic beams in plasmas for the laboratory, ex. fast-igniter concept for inertial confinement fusion, and astrophysics, ex. cosmic jets. Simulations, with the particle-in-cell code QuickPic, with a beam produced by an RF accelerator show the appearance and effects of CFI. The instability is investigated as a function of electron beam parameters (including charge, transverse size and length) and plasma parameters (density and length) by evaluating the filament currents and magnetic fields. We present simulation results, discuss further simulation refinements, suggest criteria and threshold parameters for observing the presence of CFI and outline a potential future experiment.
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
UCLA, Los Angeles, California
USC, Los Angeles, California
High gradient acceleration of electrons has recently been achieved in meter scale plasmas at SLAC. Results from these experiments show that the wakefield is sensitive to parameters in the electron beam which drives it. In the experiment the bunch lengths were varied systematically at constant charge. Here we investigate the correlation of peak beam current to the wake amplitude. The effect of beam head erosion will be discussed and an experimental limit on the transformer ratio set. The results are compared to simulation.