Energy spread minimization in a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator

Abstract

Next-generation plasma-based accelerators can push electron bunches to gigaelectronvolt energies within centimetre distances. The plasma, excited by a driver pulse, generates large electric fields that can efficiently accelerate a trailing witness bunch making possible the realization of laboratory-scale applications ranging from high-energy colliders to ultra-bright light sources. So far several experiments have demonstrated a significant acceleration but the resulting beam quality, especially the energy spread, is still far from state of the art conventional accelerators. Here we show the results of a beam-driven plasma acceleration experiment where we used an electron bunch as a driver followed by an ultra-short witness. The experiment demonstrates, for the first time, an innovative method to achieve an ultra-low energy spread of the accelerated witness of about 0.1%. This is an order of magnitude smaller than what has been obtained so far. The result can lead to a major breakthrough toward the optimization of the plasma acceleration process and its implementation in forthcoming compact machines for user-oriented applications.

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• Lattice Boltzmann method for warm fluid simulations of plasma wakefield acceleration
• Recovery of hydrogen plasma at the sub-nanosecond timescale in a plasma-wakefield accelerator
• Design, optimization and experimental characterization of RF injectors for high brightness electron beams and plasma acceleration
• Measurement of the decay of laser-driven linear plasma wakefields
• The Optimal Beam-loading in Two-bunch Nonlinear Plasma Wakefield Accelerators
• Evaluation of the Transfer Matrix of a Plasma Ramp with Squared Cosine Shape via an Approximate Solution of the Mathieu Differential Equation
• Neural-network-based longitudinal electric field prediction in nonlinear plasma wakefield accelerators