One of the main motivations for research in plasma wakefield acceleration is the advancement of high energy physics, and in particular the construction of a linear electron–positron collider. While great progress has been made in high-efficiency, high-gradient, high-quality acceleration of electron beams, acceleration of positrons is significantly more difficult in a plasma due to an inherent...
AWAKE is a proof-of-principle experiment to study proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration at CERN. Highly relativistic proton bunches (e.g. available at CERN) carry large amounts of energy (>20 kJ). They have the potential to excite ~GV/m plasma wakefields that can accelerate a witness bunch to TeV energies in a single plasma stage. The proton bunch length is on the order of 10 cm; much...
In recent studies on LWFA staging and external injection-acceleration in PWFA only a very small fraction (from below 0.1% to few percent) of the injected charge (the coupling efficiency) was accelerated. For future colliders where beam energy will need to be boosted using multiple stages, the coupling efficiency per stage must approach 100%. Here we report the first demonstration of external...
