Conveners
PS1: Plasma-based accelerators and ancillary components
- Mario Galletti (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)
- Sarah Schrรถder (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
PS1: Plasma-based accelerators and ancillary components
- Mario Galletti (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)
- Sarah Schrรถder (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
PS1: Plasma-based accelerators and ancillary components
- Sarah Schrรถder (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
- Mario Galletti (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)
PS1: Plasma-based accelerators and ancillary components
- Mario Galletti (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)
- Sarah Schrรถder (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Plasma acceleration promises to make high-energy and high-power accelerator facilities, such as linear colliders, cheaper and more compact. However, many aspects of plasma accelerators are still at a relatively low technology readiness level (TRL). Maturing the technology requires near-term applications with moderate requirements in all but the core aspects, which in particular includes...
The UK XFEL project is pioneering a transformative approach to next-generation X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). It is committed to ensuring long-term scientific impact by exploring compact, efficient, and high-gradient plasma-based accelerators to enhance the machineโs beam energy and brightness reach as part of a future upgrade strategy. Among the most promising avenues, plasma-based...
In recent years, plasma accelerators have advanced significantly toward producing beams suitable for colliders, aiming to replace conventional MV/m RF fields with GV/m fields of nonlinear plasma waves. Realizing a plasma-based collider requires electron bunches with high charge (hundreds of pC), low normalized emittance (~100 nm), and energy spread below 1%. Minimizing energy spread during...
Plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) has attracted great interest due to its large accelerating gradient, i.e. orders of magnitude higher than that in conventional accelerators. The purpose-built FEBE (Full Energy Beam Exploitation) beamline at CLARA facility at Daresbury lab will provide ultra-bright electron beams which enable us to exploit a wide range of PWFA experiments. In this talk, we...
Plasma accelerators can sustain extremely high field gradients, making them strong candidates for future X-ray sources and compact linear colliders. Achieving the high luminosity required for collider applications necessitates the use of flat beams to minimize harmful beamstrahlung effects. However, we show that flat beams in plasma accelerators are susceptible to beam quality degradation due...
Hybrid laser- and electron beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerators (L-PWFAs) combine the compactness of laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) with the beam quality and stability of particle-driven wakefield acceleration (PWFA). In this scheme, an LWFA stage generates a high-current electron bunch that drives a PWFA stage, where a witness bunch is internally injected and accelerated.
Our...
We present recent progress at the Center for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) toward generating high-energy electron beams with minimal divergence and high stability. First, employing the petawatt (PW) laser ATLAS-3000, we aim to produce multi-GeV, precision-injected electron beams for a BreitโWheeler pair creation experiment. Emphasis is placed on reliable performance in complex collision...
Electron beams from a wakefield accelerator are usually assumed to be short, comparable to the plasma wavelength. Under certain conditions, as the electrons start to exit the accelerator, the plasma wavelength increases and the electrons are moved into the decelerating phase of the wakefield. At this point, the electrons start to lose energy, and a fraction of them are separated and lost from...
The rapid evolution of advanced accelerator technology calls for high-fidelity computational models that can accurately reproduce experimental observations. Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) has emerged as a promising method for generating high-energy electron beams among the diverse high-gradient acceleration techniques. To accurately capture the complex physical dynamics observed in LWFA...
Laser-wakefield accelerators (LWFA) deliver high quality, mono-energetic electron beams in a compact and reliable way. Yet, achieving multi-GeV electron bunches, without requiring additional laser beams or plasma channels, remains a challenge that may require changing our approach that will facilitate the acceleration of even more energetic electron beams. For that, LWFA must overcome...
Following recent advances that have pushed LPA energy gains to the 10โฏGeV level, attention is beginning to shift toward enhancing beam quality, tunability, and reliability in this regime. In this context, we propose a novel scheme for controlling the injection of a high-quality electron bunch into a channel-guided laser-plasma accelerator. This all-optical technique, *constricted waveguide...
We report on the experimental generation of high-energy (10 GeV), ultra-short (fs-duration), ultra-high current (0.1 MA) electron beams with petawatt peak power at FACET-II [1]. These extreme beams enable the exploration of a new frontier of high-intensity beam-light and beam-matter interactions broadly relevant across fields ranging from advanced accelerators, laboratory astrophysics, strong...
We describe recent results from our programme to develop high-repetition-rate, GeV-scale plasma-modulated plasma accelerators (P-MoPAs), which seeks to utilize advanced thin-disk lasers (TDLs) that can deliver joule-scale, picosecond-duration pulses, at kHz repetition rates.
A P-MoPA has three stages: (i) a modulator, in which a TDL pulse is guided in a hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized...
The FLASHForward experiment at DESY uses high-quality electron bunches from the FLASH linac to perform fundamental plasma-wakefield-accelerator research. An overview of recent results will be provided in three areas: beam-quality preservation, energy efficient acceleration and repetition-rate limits. By precisely controlling the transverse properties of the witness bunch we demonstrate the...
At the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests II (FACET-II) at SLAC, we are undertaking experiments in plasma wakefield acceleration using a 10 GeV electron beam configured as a drive and witness pair. We will share our progress towards the ultimate goal of doubling the energy of the 10 GeV witness bunch by PWFA, with high efficiency and while preserving beam quality. Our latest...
To compete with conventional accelerators, collider and light source applications based on plasma wakefield acceleration need to be able to handle 10s of Joules of energy transfer between the drive beam, plasma, and witness beam at repetition rates exceeding 100 Hz. Scaling up to these parameters is challenging due to the large amount of heat deposited in the plasma source. To begin...
The EuPRAXIA@SPARC_LAB project is developing a compact high-brightness electron beam facility for plasma acceleration and advanced radiation sources. A central element is the definition and experimental validation of a nominal working point (WP) suitable for plasma injection. This WP relies on an innovative use of RF compression, achieved in two accelerating sections within the photoinjector,...
The Center for Ultrafast Optical Science (CUOS) at the University of Michigan has constructed a new high-power laser user facility called ZEUS (the Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort Pulse Laser System), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). ZEUS currently operates at a power exceeding 2 petawatts, with a pulse duration of 25 femtoseconds and a repetition rate of one shot per minute....
A wakefield experiment at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA) facility utilizes flat electron beams with highly asymmetric transverse emittances to drive plasma wakefields in the underdense regime. These beams create elliptical blowout structures, producing asymmetric transverse focusing forces. The experiment utilizes a compact 4-cm-long capillary discharge plasma source developed at...
Strongly focusing plasma lenses have been proposed to mitigate chromatic aberrations in the high-strength focusing systems needed to accommodate the small beam sizes associated with plasma-based accelerators and collider final foci. Active plasma lenses focus using the azimuthal magnetic field generated by an electric discharge through a plasma. Emittance preservation with such lenses has been...
The hosing instability, a significant concern for accelerator applications, poses limitations on achieving high energy gain over long distances. Understanding and mitigating this instability is crucial for advancing accelerator technologies. The AWAKE experiment at CERN offers a unique opportunity to investigate the hosing instability in a plasma wakefield accelerator using a long proton bunch...
Current multi petawatt laser systems allow unprecedented experimental tests of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in all-optical schemes. In this work we demonstrate experimentally that a single-laser beam Compton scattering arrangement leads to GeV energy photons [Matheron et al. 2024]. The collisions between a reproducible nC, multi-GeV electron beam and the unspent laser by the plasma...
We will report on an experimental campaign to explore inverse Compton scattering using the 1PW experimental area E5 at ELI-NP. Laser pulses containing up to 20 J were focused into a gas jet to accelerate electrons beams to GeV energies via laser wakefield acceleration. The residual laser exiting the plasma accelerator was then back-reflected onto the electron beam using a tape-based plasma...
Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) has been evidenced by a capability of reaching acceleration gradients ranging from tens to hundreds of GV/m, thereby reducing the footprint and cost of accelerators. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), featuring high plasma density (>10$^{19}$ cm$^{-3}$) and the ability to tailor plasma density effectively, have emerged as a novel solid-state plasma source. Recent...
