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.
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 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.
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
Funding: Work supported by the DOE under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515.
Facilities for Accelerator Science and Experimental Test Beams (FACET) is a proposed facility at SLAC that would use the initial two-thirds of the linac to transport e+ and e- beams to an experimental region. A principal use of this facility is to identify the optimum method for accelerating positrons in a beam driven plasma wakefield accelerator. To study this, a positron bunch, followed ½ an rf cycle later by an electron bunch, will be accelerated to an asymmetric chicane designed to move the positrons behind the electrons, and then on to the plasma wakefield test stand. A major focus of study was the coupling of jitter of the positron bunch to the electron bunch via linac wakes. Lucretia is a Matlab toolbox for the simulation of electron beam transport systems, capable of multi-bunch tracking and wakefield calculations. With the exception of the lack of support for tracking of electrons and positrons within a single bunch train, it was well suited to the jitter coupling studies. This paper describes the jitter studies, including modifications made to Lucretia to correctly simulate tracking of mixed-species bunch trains through a lattice of magnetic elements and em wakes.