Speaker
Valentina Martinelli
(LNF)
Description
Experimental research on plasma acceleration techniques is one of the most important activities presently ongoing at SPARC_LAB, the multidisciplinary facility of INFN Frascati Laboratories, bunches with energies up to 170 MeV feeding four experimental beamlines. The facility is based on the combination of high power laser pulses (300TW), from the FLAME facility, with high brightness beams (≈10^15 A m^−2 rad^−2 ) from the SPARC photo-injector. The recent activity has been mainly focused on the study of particle driven plasma waves, while a run dedicated to the study of laser driven plasma wave is in preparation. External injection in a laser driven plasma can potentially provide very high accelerating fields and good beam quality, but it requires both bunch lengths and a relative arrival time jitter (ATJ) between the injected beam and the laser pulse generating the plasma in the 10 fs range. Thus, since the bunch has to be shortened, it tends to follow the RF phase of the compressor and to lose its time relation to the photocathode laser. The paper presents numerical studies to optimize the photoinjector working point in order to meet the bunch length and synchronization requirements by investigating and exploiting the difference between the intra-bunch energy chirp, which depends also on space charge, and the multi-shot time-energy distribution of bunch centroids.
Primary author
Valentina Martinelli
(LNF)
Co-authors
Alessandro Gallo
(LNF)
Dr
Andrea Renato Rossi
(MI)
Enrica Chiadroni
(LNF)
Luca Piersanti
(LNF)
Marco Bellaveglia
(LNF)
Massimo Ferrario
(LNF)
Dr
Riccardo Pompili
(LNF)