Analytic plasma wakefield limits for active plasma lenses

Abstract

Active plasma lensing is a promising technology for compact focusing of particle beams that has seen a recent surge of interest. While these lenses can provide strong focusing gradients of order kT/m and focusing in both transverse planes, there are limitations from nonlinear aberrations, causing emittance growth in the beams being focused. One cause of such aberrations is beam-driven plasma wakefields, present if the beam density is sufficiently high. We develop simple, but powerful analytic formulas for the effective focusing gradient from these wakefields, and use this to set limits on which parts of the beam and plasma parameter space permits distortion-free use of active plasma lenses. It is concluded that the application of active plasma lenses to conventional and plasma-based linear colliders may prove very challenging, except perhaps in the final focus system, unless the typical discharge currents used are dramatically increased, and that in general these lenses are better suited for accelerator applications with lower beam intensities.

arXiv comment10 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Overview of the CLEAR plasma lens experiment

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Emittance Preservation in an Aberration-Free Active Plasma Lens
• Correlated Energy Spread Compensation in Multi-Stage Plasma-Based Accelerators
• Staging of High-Gradient Wakefield Accelerators
• Direct Measurement of Focusing Fields in Active Plasma Lenses
• Beam Delivery and Beamstrahlung Considerations for Ultra-High Energy Linear Colliders
• Emittance preservation in advanced accelerators