No Arabic abstract
Plasma injection schemes are crucial for producing high-quality electron beams in laser-plasma accelerators. This article introduces the general concepts of plasma injection. First, a Hamiltonian model for particle trapping and acceleration in plasma waves is introduced; ionization injection and colliding-pulse injection are described in the framework of this Hamiltonian model. We then proceed to consider injection in plasma density gradients.
An active plasma lens focuses the beam in both the horizontal and vertical planes simultaneously using a magnetic field generated by a discharge current through the plasma. A beam size of 5--10 $mu$m can be achieved using an focusing gradient on the order of 100 T/m. The active plasma lens is therefore an attractive element for plasma wakefield acceleration, because an ultra-small size of the witness electron beam is required for injection into the plasma wakefield to minimize emittance growth and to enhance the capturing efficiency. When the driving beam and witness electron beam co-propagate through the active plasma lens, interactions between the driving and witness beams and the plasma must be considered. In this paper, through particle-in-cell simulations, we discuss the possibility of using an active plasma lens for the final focusing of the electron beam in the presence of driving proton bunches. The beam parameters for AWAKE Run 2 are taken as an example for this type of application. It is confirmed that the amplitude of the plasma wakefield excited by proton bunches remains the same even after propagation through the active plasma lens. The emittance of the witness electron beam increases rapidly in the plasma density ramp regions of the lens. Nevertheless, when the witness electron beam has a charge of 100 pC, emittance of 10 mm mrad, and bunch length of 60 $mu$m, its emittance growth is not significant along the active plasma lens. For small emittance, such as 2 mm mrad, the emittance growth is found to be strongly dependent on the plasma density.
The generation of polarized particle beams still relies on conventional particle accelerators, which are typically very large in scale and budget. Concepts based on laser-driven wake-field acceleration have strongly been promoted during the last decades. Despite many advances in the understanding of fundamental physical phenomena, one largely unexplored issue is how the particle spins are influenced by the huge magnetic fields of plasma and, thus, how highly polarized beams can be produced. The realization of laser-plasma based accelerators for polarized beams is now being pursued as a joint effort of groups from Forschungszentrum Julich (Germany), University of Crete (Greece), and SIOM Shanghai (China) within the ATHENA consortium. As a first step, we have theoretically investigated and identified the mechanisms that influence the beam polarization in laser-plasma accelerators. We then carried out a set of Particle-in-cell simulations on the acceleration of electrons and proton beams from gaseous and foil targets. We could show that intense polarized beams may be produced if pre-polarized gas targets of high density are employed. In these proceedings we further present that the polarization of protons in HT and HCl gas targets is largely conserved during laser wake-field acceleration, even if the proton energies enter the multi-GeV regime. Such polarized sources for electrons, protons, deuterons and $^{3}$He ions are now being built in Julich. Proof-of-principle measurements at the (multi-)PW laser facilities PHELIX (GSI Darmstadt) and SULF (Shanghai) are in preparation.
Laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs) outperform current radiofrequency technology in acceleration strength by orders of magnitude. Yet, enabling them to deliver competitive beam quality for demanding applications, particularly in terms of energy spread and stability, remains a major challenge. In this Letter, we propose to combine bunch decompression and active plasma dechirping for drastically improving the energy profile and stability of beams from LPAs. Start-to-end simulations demonstrate the efficacy of such post-acceleration phase-space manipulations and the potential to reduce current state-of-the-art energy spread and jitter from $1%$ to $0.10%$ and $0.024%$, respectively, closing the beam-quality gap to conventional acceleration schemes.
The evolution of beam phase space in ionization-induced injection into plasma wakefields is studied using theory and particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. The injection process causes special longitudinal and transverse phase mixing leading initially to a rapid emittance growth followed by oscillation, decay, and eventual slow growth to saturation. An analytic theory for this evolution is presented that includes the effects of injection distance (time), acceleration distance, wakefield structure, and nonlinear space charge forces. Formulas for the emittance in the low and high space charge regimes are presented. The theory is verified through PIC simulations and a good agreement is obtained. This work shows how ultra-low emittance beams can be produced using ionization-induced injection.
Plasma-based accelerators have achieved tremendous progress in the past few decades, thanks to the advances of high power lasers and the availability of high-energy and relativistic particle beams. However, the electrons (or positrons) accelerated in the plasma wakefields are subject to radiation losses, which generally suppress the final energy gains of the beams. In this paper, radiation reaction in plasma-based high-energy accelerators is investigated using test particle approach. Energy-frontier TeV colliders based on a multiple stage laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerator and a single-staged proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerator are studied in detail. The results show that the higher axial and transverse field gradients seen by an off-axis injected witness beam result in a stronger damping force on the accelerated particles. Proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerated electrons are shown to lose less energy compared to those accelerated in a multi-staged laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerator.