FLASHForward is a beam-driven plasma-wakefield accelerator (PWFA) experiment at DESY, acting as a test bench to develop technologies to accelerate electron beams with high quality and high average power. By enhancing conventional acceleration methods with plasma acceleration, the cost and footprint of future accelerators could be significantly reduced. To achieve this, it is crucial to have...
The acceleration of positron beams in plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA) has gained significant interest in recent years due to its potential applications in colliders. One promising scheme for achieving positron acceleration in PWFA is to create an electron-driven blowout wake within a finite-radius, pre-ionized plasma column (narrow plasma column). This approach allows for the formation of...
Beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration can sustain accelerating fields on
the GV/m scale, making it well-suited for linear collider applications. However,
in recent years, an efficiency-instability relation has been proposed, which limits
the energy transfer efficiency from the wake to the trailing bunch that can be achieved
without inducing transverse instabilities detrimental to the...
The thin, underdense, passive plasma lens promises compact, strong, tunable, axisymmetric focusing of intense electron beams. It is ideally suited for matching beams into and out of plasma wakefield accelerator stages, and for reducing divergence of high-brightness plasma-injected beams as they exit the plasma source. The plasma lens comprises a sub-millimeter scale, laser-ionized plasma in...
Filamentation instability can occur in plasma wakefield accelerators as well as in astrophysical media. This instability takes place when a charged particle bunch streams through a plasma with skin depth smaller than the bunch transverse size, so that the plasma return current flows within the bunch. Repulsion between opposite currents tends to reinforce any initial transverse perturbation or...
To suppress the BBU instability and improve characteristics of accelerated bunches in Dielectric Wakefield Accelerator one can be used the plasma filling of the transport channel*.
Here we present the results of analytical and numerical studies of the dynamics of accelerated electron/positron and drive electron bunches under wake acceleration in a plasma DWA with a vacuum channel. The wake...
A wakefield experiment that will utilize electron beams with highly asymmetric transverse emittances, or flat beams, to drive plasma wakefields is underway at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA) facility . In the underdense regime, the flat beams create an elliptical blowout structure, resulting in asymmetric focusing forces in the transverse planes. The beam evolution and matching...
The Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests II (FACET-II) has successfully completed its first plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) experiments using the two-bunch beam delivery configuration. In these initial studies, a drive and witness pair of bunches were produced at the photocathode injector, co-accelerated, and transported to the experimental area. Two plasma sources were...
In plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA) we usually assume that the plasma is infinitely wide, a property generally desirable for high-quality high-efficiency acceleration of electrons in the blowout regime of PWFA. Finite-width plasmas have gained a particular attention due to their potential applications for light sources and positron acceleration schemes. When the plasma is narrow...
A new paradigm based on oscillations of quantum gas of conduction band electrons known as plasmons has opened unprecedented PetaVolts per meter fields [1,2,3,4]. PV/m fields can be attained using a class of non-perturbative plasmons uncovered in our work. This class of plasmons is excited by particle beams launched inside a conductive tube which makes it possible to control the excitation of...
Plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA) have showcased remarkable acceleration gradients, reaching tens of GeV per meter. Advancements in generating high-quality beams via self-injection schemes and pursuing attosecond electron beams represent the forefront of this field. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to inject a high-quality electron beam using beam-induced ionization injection...
We demonstrate through high-fidelity particle-in-cell simulations a simple approach for efficiently generating 20+ GeV electron beams with the necessary charge, energy spread, and emittance for use as the injector for an electron arm of a future linear collider or a next generation XFEL. The self-focusing of an unmatched, relatively low quality, drive beam results in self-injection by...
Plasma-based acceleration (PBA) has emerged as a promising candidate for the accelerator technology used to build a future linear collider and/or an advanced light source. In PBA, the witness beam needs to be matched to the focusing forces of the wakefield (WF) to reduce the emittance growth. In some linear collider designs, the matched spot size of the witness beam can be 2 to 3 orders of...