Recovery time of a plasma-wakefield accelerator

Abstract

The interaction of intense particle bunches with plasma can give rise to plasma wakes capable of sustaining gigavolt-per-metre electric fields, which are orders of magnitude higher than provided by state-of-the-art radio-frequency technology. Plasma wakefields can, therefore, strongly accelerate charged particles and offer the opportunity to reach higher particle energies with smaller and hence more widely available accelerator facilities. However, the luminosity and brilliance demands of high-energy physics and photon science require particle bunches to be accelerated at repetition rates of thousands or even millions per second, which are orders of magnitude higher than demonstrated with plasma-wakefield technology. Here we investigate the upper limit on repetition rates of beam-driven plasma accelerators by measuring the time it takes for the plasma to recover to its initial state after perturbation by a wakefield. The many-nanosecond-level recovery time measured establishes the in-principle attainability of megahertz rates of acceleration in plasmas. The experimental signatures of the perturbation are well described by simulations of a temporally evolving parabolic ion channel, transferring energy from the collapsing wake to the surrounding media. This result establishes that plasma-wakefield modules could be developed as feasible high-repetition-rate energy boosters at current and future particle-physics and photon-science facilities.

References in corpus (5)

• Ultra-high quality factors in superconducting niobium cavities in ambient magnetic fields up to 190 mG
• Meter-Scale, Conditioned Hydrodynamic Optical-Field-Ionized Plasma Channels
• HiPACE++: a portable, 3D quasi-static Particle-in-Cell code
• Evolution of longitudinal plasma-density profiles in discharge capillaries for plasma wakefield accelerators
• Plasma wakefield acceleration studies using the quasi-static code WAKE

Cited by in corpus (11)

• A hybrid, asymmetric, linear Higgs factory based on plasma-wakefield and radio-frequency acceleration
• Emittance preservation in a plasma-wakefield accelerator
• 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
• Longitudinally resolved measurement of energy-transfer efficiency in a plasma-wakefield accelerator
• Characterization and automated optimization of laser-driven proton beams from converging liquid sheet jet targets
• Correlations between X-rays, Visible Light and Drive-Beam Energy Loss Observed in Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiments at FACET-II
• Measurement of the decay of laser-driven linear plasma wakefields
• Thermal fluid closures and pressure anisotropies in numerical simulations of plasma wakefield acceleration
• Effects of the transversely nonuniform plasma density in a blowout regime of a plasma wakefield accelerator
• Neural-network-based longitudinal electric field prediction in nonlinear plasma wakefield accelerators