No Arabic abstract
We investigate beam loading and emittance preservation for a high-charge electron beam being accelerated in quasi-linear plasma wakefields driven by a short proton beam. The structure of the studied wakefields are similar to those of a long, modulated proton beam, such as the AWAKE proton driver. We show that by properly choosing the electron beam parameters and exploiting two well known effects, beam loading of the wakefield and full blow out of plasma electrons by the accelerated beam, the electron beam can gain large amounts of energy with a narrow final energy spread (%-level) and without significant emittance growth.
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.
Next-generation plasma-based accelerators can push electron beams to GeV energies within centimetre distances. The plasma, excited by a driver pulse, is indeed able to sustain huge electric fields that can efficiently accelerate a trailing witness bunch, which was experimentally demonstrated on multiple occasions. Thus, the main focus of the current research is being shifted towards achieving a high quality of the beam after the plasma acceleration. In this letter we present beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiment, where initially preformed high-quality witness beam was accelerated inside the plasma and characterized. In this experiment the witness beam quality after the acceleration was maintained on high level, with $0.2%$ final energy spread and $3.8~mu m$ resulting normalized transverse emittance after the acceleration. In this article, for the first time to our knowledge, the emittance of the PWFA beam was directly measured.
Ionization injection triggered by short wavelength laser pulses inside a nonlinear wakefield driven by a longer wavelength laser is examined via multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. We find that very bright electron beams can be generated through this two-color scheme in either collinear propagating or transverse colliding geometry. For a fixed laser intensity $I$, lasers with longer/shorter wavelength $lambda$ have larger/smaller ponderomotive potential ($propto I lambda^2$). The two color scheme utilizes this property to separate the injection process from the wakefield excitation process. Very strong wakes can be generated at relatively low laser intensities by using a longer wavelength laser driver (e.g. a $10 micrometer$ CO$_2$ laser) due to its very large ponderomotive potential. On the other hand, short wavelength laser can produce electrons with very small residual momenta ($p_perpsim a_0sim sqrt{I}lambda$) inside the wake, leading to electron beams with very small normalized emittances (tens of $ anometer$). Using particle-in-cell simulations we show that a $sim10 femtosecond$ electron beam with $sim4 picocoulomb$ of charge and a normalized emittance of $sim 50 anometer$ can be generated by combining a 10 $micrometer $ driving laser with a 400 $ anometer$ injection laser, which is an improvement of more than one order of magnitude compared to the typical results obtained when a single wavelength laser used for both the wake formation and ionization injection.
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.
Active plasma lensing is a compact technology for strong focusing of charged particle beams, which has gained considerable interest for use in novel accelerator schemes. While providing kT/m focusing gradients, active plasma lenses can have aberrations caused by a radially nonuniform plasma temperature profile, leading to degradation of the beam quality. We present the first direct measurement of this aberration, consistent with theory, and show that it can be fully suppressed by changing from a light gas species (helium) to a heavier gas species (argon). Based on this result, we demonstrate emittance preservation for an electron beam focused by an argon-filled active plasma lens.