High-Quality Electron Beams from Beam-Driven Plasma Accelerators by Wakefield-Induced Ionization Injection

Abstract

We propose a new and simple strategy for controlled ionization-induced trapping of electrons in a beam-driven plasma accelerator. The presented method directly exploits electric wakefields to ionize electrons from a dopant gas and capture them into a well-defined volume of the accelerating and focusing wake phase, leading to high-quality witness-bunches. This injection principle is explained by example of three-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) calculations using the code OSIRIS. In these simulations a high-current-density electron-beam driver excites plasma waves in the blow-out regime inside a fully-ionized hydrogen plasma of density $5\times 10^{17}\mathrm{c}{\mathrm{m}}^{-3}$. Within an embedded $100\mu \mathrm{m}$ long plasma column contaminated with neutral helium gas, the wakefields trigger ionization, trapping of a defined fraction of the released electrons, and subsequent acceleration. The hereby generated electron beam features a $1.5\mathrm{kA}$ peak current, $1.5\mu \mathrm{m}$ transverse normalized emittance, an uncorrelated energy spread of 0.3% on a GeV-energy scale, and few femtosecond bunch length.

References in corpus (1)

• One-to-one direct modeling of experiments and astrophysical scenarios: pushing the envelope on kinetic plasma simulations

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Physics of nanocoulomb-class electron beams in laser-plasma wakefields
• Demonstration of a compact plasma accelerator powered by laser-accelerated electron beams
• The FLASHForward Facility at DESY
• Direct observation of plasma waves and dynamics induced by laser-accelerated electron beams
• FLASHForward: Plasma-wakefield accelerator science for high-average-power applications
• Intrinsic Stabilization of the Drive Beam in Plasma Wakefield Accelerators
• Stable and high quality electron beams from staged laser and plasma wakefield accelerators
• Wakefield-Induced Ionization injection in beam-driven plasma accelerators
• Nano-scale electron bunching in laser-triggered ionization injection in plasma accelerators
• Evidence for high-energy and low-emittance electron beams using ionization injection of charge in a plasma wakefield accelerator
• Hybrid LWFA $|$ PWFA Staging as a Beam Energy and Brightness Transformer : Conceptual Design and Simulations
• Ultra-Bright Electron Bunch Injection in a Plasma Wakefield Driven by a Superluminal Flying Focus Electron Beam
• On the generation of ultra-bright and low energy spread electron beams in laser wakefield acceleration in a uniform plasma
• Generation of Low Absolute Energy Spread Electron Beams in Laser Wakefield Acceleration Using Tightly Focused Laser through Near-Ionization-Threshold Injection
• Intrinsic energy spread and bunch length growth in plasma-based accelerators due to betatron motion
• Ponderomotive Injection in Plasma Wakefield Accelerators
• Controlled density-downramp injection in a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator
• Restoring betatron phase coherence in a beam-loaded laser-wakefield accelerator
• Characterisation of beam driven ionisation injection in the blowout regime of Plasma Acceleration
• Layout considerations for a future electron plasma research accelerator facility EuPRAXIA