No Arabic abstract
A long, relativistic charged particle beam propagating in a plasma is subject to the self-modulation instability. This instability is analyzed and the growth rate is calculated, including the phase relation. The phase velocity of the accelerating field is shown to be significantly less than the drive beam velocity. These results indicate that the energy gain of a plasma accelerator driven by a self-modulated beam will be severely limited by dephasing. In the long-beam, strongly-coupled regime, dephasing is reached in less than four e-foldings, independent of beam-plasma parameters.
It is demonstrated that the performance of the self-modulated proton driver plasma wakefield accelerator (SM-PDPWA) is strongly affected by the reduced phase velocity of the plasma wave. Using analytical theory and particle-in-cell simulations, we show that the reduction is largest during the linear stage of self-modulation. As the instability nonlinearly saturates, the phase velocity approaches that of the driver. The deleterious effects of the wakes dynamics on the maximum energy gain of accelerated electrons can be avoided using side-injections of electrons, or by controlling the wakes phase velocity by smooth plasma density gradients.
Metre-scale plasma wakefield accelerators have imparted energy gain approaching 10 gigaelectronvolts to single nano-Coulomb electron bunches. To reach useful average currents, however, the enormous energy density that the driver deposits into the wake must be removed efficiently between shots. Yet mechanisms by which wakes dissipate their energy into surrounding plasma remain poorly understood. Here, we report ps-time-resolved, grazing-angle optical shadowgraphic measurements and large-scale particle-in-cell simulations of ion channels emerging from broken wakes that electron bunches from the SLAC linac generate in tenuous lithium plasma. Measurements show the channel boundary expands radially at 1 million metres-per-second for over a nanosecond. Simulations show that ions and electrons that the original wake propels outward, carrying 90 percent of its energy, drive this expansion by impact-ionizing surrounding neutral lithium. The results provide a basis for understanding global thermodynamics of multi-GeV plasma accelerators, which underlie their viability for applications demanding high average beam current.
Plasma wakefield dynamics over timescales up to 800 ps, approximately 100 plasma periods, are studied experimentally at the Advanced Wakefield Experiment (AWAKE). The development of the longitudinal wakefield amplitude driven by a self-modulated proton bunch is measured using the external injection of witness electrons that sample the fields. In simulation, resonant excitation of the wakefield causes plasma electron trajectory crossing, resulting in the development of a potential outside the plasma boundary as electrons are transversely ejected. Trends consistent with the presence of this potential are experimentally measured and their dependence on wakefield amplitude are studied via seed laser timing scans and electron injection delay scans.
The plasma density grating induced by intersecting intense laser pulses can be utilized as an optical compressors, polarizers, waveplates and photonic crystals for the manipulation of ultra-high-power laser pulses. However, the formation and evolution of the plasma density grating are still not fully understood as linear models are adopted to describe them usually. In this paper, two nonlinear theoretical models are presented to study the formation process of the plasma density grating. In the first model, a nonlinear analytical solution based on the fluid equations is presented while in the second model a particle-mesh method is adopted to investigate the kinetic effects. It is found that both models can describe the plasma density grating formation at different stages, well beyond the linear growth stage. More importantly, the second model can reproduce the phenomenon of ion wave-breaking of plasma density grating, which eventually induces the saturation of plasma density grating. Using the second model, the saturation time of the plasma density grating is obtained as a function of laser intensity and plasma density, which can be applied to estimate the lifetime of the plasma density grating in experiments. The results from these two nonlinear models are verified using particle-in-cell simulations.
In the past decades, beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) experiments have seen remarkable progress by using high-energy particle beams such as electron, positron and proton beams to drive wakes in neutral gas or pre-ionized plasma. This review highlights a few recent experiments in the world to compare experiment parameters and results.