FLASHForward: Plasma-wakefield accelerator science for high-average-power applications

Abstract

The FLASHForward experimental facility is a high-performance test-bed for precision plasma-wakefield research, aiming to accelerate high-quality electron beams to GeV-levels in a few centimetres of ionised gas. The plasma is created by ionising gas in a gas cell either by a high-voltage discharge or a high-intensity laser pulse. The electrons to be accelerated will either be injected internally from the plasma background or externally from the FLASH superconducting RF front end. In both cases the wakefield will be driven by electron beams provided by the FLASH gun and linac modules operating with a 10 Hz macro-pulse structure, generating 1.25 GeV, 1 nC electron bunches at up to 3 MHz micro-pulse repetition rates. At full capacity, this FLASH bunch-train structure corresponds to 30 kW of average power, orders of magnitude higher than drivers available to other state-of-the-art LWFA and PWFA experiments. This high-power functionality means FLASHForward is the only plasma-wakefield facility in the world with the immediate capability to develop, explore, and benchmark high-average-power plasma-wakefield research essential for next-generation facilities. The operational parameters and technical highlights of the experiment are discussed, as well as the scientific goals and high-average-power outlook.

References in corpus (12)

• One-to-one direct modeling of experiments and astrophysical scenarios: pushing the envelope on kinetic plasma simulations
• Exploiting multi-scale parallelism for large scale numerical modelling of laser wakefield accelerators
• Generation of High Brightness Electron Beams via Ionization Induced Injection by Transverse Colliding Lasers in a Beam-Driven Plasma Wakefield Accelerator
• High Repetition-Rate Wakefield Electron Source Generated by Few-millijoule, 30 femtosecond Laser Pulses on a Density Downramp
• Mitigation of the hose instability in plasma-wakefield accelerators
• Emittance Preservation in an Aberration-Free Active Plasma Lens
• A tunable plasma-based energy dechirper
• The FLASHForward Facility at DESY
• High-Quality Electron Beams from Beam-Driven Plasma Accelerators by Wakefield-Induced Ionization Injection
• Generation and Characterization of Electron Bunches with Ramped Current Profiles in a Dual-Frequency Superconducting Linear Accelerator
• Intrinsic Stabilization of the Drive Beam in Plasma Wakefield Accelerators
• Direct Measurement of Focusing Fields in Active Plasma Lenses

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Recovery time of a plasma-wakefield accelerator
• A hybrid, asymmetric, linear Higgs factory based on plasma-wakefield and radio-frequency acceleration
• Emittance preservation in a plasma-wakefield accelerator
• Evolution of longitudinal plasma-density profiles in discharge capillaries for plasma wakefield accelerators
• Matching small $\beta$ functions using centroid jitter and two beam position monitors
• Energy Depletion and Re-Acceleration of Driver Electrons in a Plasma-Wakefield Accelerator
• Ponderomotive Injection in Plasma Wakefield Accelerators
• Controlled density-downramp injection in a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator
• Experimental study of extended timescale dynamics of a plasma wakefield driven by a self-modulated proton bunch
• Longitudinally resolved measurement of energy-transfer efficiency in a plasma-wakefield accelerator
• Experimental demonstration of a tomographic 5D phase-space reconstruction
• The Optimal Beam-loading in Two-bunch Nonlinear Plasma Wakefield Accelerators
• Effects of the transversely nonuniform plasma density in a blowout regime of a plasma wakefield accelerator
• Beam current from downramp injection in electron-driven plasma wakefields
• Progress of the FLASHForward X-2 high-beam-quality, high-efficiency plasma-accelerator experiment
• A dump leakage calorimeter to measure the flux of high-energy electrons and photons
• Neural-network-based longitudinal electric field prediction in nonlinear plasma wakefield accelerators
• Analytical theory of the skewed wake effect
• High brightness, symmetric electron bunch generation in a plasma wakefield accelerator via a radially-polarized plasma photocathode
• Slice Emittance Preservation and Focus Control in a Passive Plasma Lens