Beam-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration based on external injection has the potential to significantly reduce the size of future accelerators. Stability and quality of the acceleration process substantially depends on the incoming bunch parameters. Precise control of the current profile is essential for optimising energy-transfer efficiency and preserving energy spread. At the FLASHForward facility, driver--witness bunch pairs of adjustable bunch length and separation are generated by a set of collimators in a dispersive section, which enables fs-level control of the longitudinal bunch profile. The design of the collimator apparatus and its commissioning is presented.
The FLASHForward project at DESY is a pioneering plasma-wakefield acceleration experiment that aims to produce, in a few centimetres of ionised hydrogen, beams with energy of order GeV that are of quality sufficient to be used in a free-electron laser. The plasma wave will be driven by high-current density electron beams from the FLASH linear accelerator and will explore both external and internal witness-beam injection techniques. The plasma is created by ionising a gas in a gas cell with a multi-TW laser system, which can also be used to provide optical diagnostics of the plasma and electron beams due to the <30 fs synchronisation between the laser and the driving electron beam. The operation parameters of the experiment are discussed, as well as the scientific program.
KEK-ATF is studying the low-emittance multi-bunch electron beam for the future linear collider. In ATF, thermionic gun is used to generate 20 bunches electron beam with the bunch spacing of 2.8 ns. Due to a distortion of the gun emission and the beam loading effect in the bunching system, the intensity for each bunch is not uniform by up to 40 % at the end of the injector. We have developed a system to correct the gun emission by precisely controlling the cathode voltage with a function generator. For the beam loading effect, we have introduced RF amplitude modulation on Sub Harmonic Buncher, SHB. By these technique, bunch intensity uniformity was improved and beam transmission for later bunches was recovered from 67% to 91%, but intensity for first five bunches is still lower than others.
Plasma waves generated in the wake of intense, relativistic laser or particle beams can accelerate electron bunches to giga-electronvolt (GeV) energies in centimetre-scale distances. This allows the realization of compact accelerators having emerging applications, ranging from modern light sources such as the free-electron laser (FEL) to energy frontier lepton colliders. In a plasma wakefield accelerator, such multi-gigavolt-per-metre (GV m$^{-1}$) wakefields can accelerate witness electron bunches that are either externally injected or captured from the background plasma. Here we demonstrate optically triggered injection and acceleration of electron bunches, generated in a multi-component hydrogen and helium plasma employing a spatially aligned and synchronized laser pulse. This plasma photocathode decouples injection from wake excitation by liberating tunnel-ionized helium electrons directly inside the plasma cavity, where these cold electrons are then rapidly boosted to relativistic velocities. The injection regime can be accessed via optical density down-ramp injection, is highly tunable and paves the way to generation of electron beams with unprecedented low transverse emittance, high current and 6D-brightness. This experimental path opens numerous prospects for transformative plasma wakefield accelerator applications based on ultra-high brightness beams.
Realization of a short bunch beam by manipulating the longitudinal phase space distribution with a finite longitudinal dispersion following an off-crest accelera- tion is a widely used technique. The technique was applied in a compact test accelerator of an energy-recovery linac scheme for compressing the bunch length at the return loop. A diagnostic system utilizing coherent transition radiation was developed for the beam tuning and for estimating the bunch length. By scanning the beam parameters, we experimentally found the best condition for the bunch compression. The RMS bunch length of 250+-50 fs was obtained at a bunch charge of 2 pC. This result confirmed the design and the tuning pro- cedure of the bunch compression operation for the future energy-recovery linac (ERL).
This paper presents history and evolution of the intra-bunch feedback system for circular accelerators. This pro-ject has been presented by John D. Fox (SLAC/Stanford Un.) at the IPAC2010 held in Kyoto. The idea of the pro-posal is to build a flexible and powerful instrument to mit-igate the parasitic e-cloud effects on the proton (and poten-tially positron) beams in storage rings. Being a new and ambitious project, the financial issues have been quite im-portant. US LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP) and other institution funding sources have assured the de-velopment of the design for implementing the feedback in the SPS ring at CERN. Here the intra-bunch feedback sys-tem has been installed and tested in the frame of the LIU (LHC Injector Upgrade) program. After the end of the LARP funding, a possible new inter-esting chance to continue the R&D activity, could be by implementing the system in a lepton storage ring affected by e-cloud effects. For achieving this goal, a possible ex-periment could be carried out in the positron ring of DAFNE at Frascati, Italy. The feasibility of the proposal is evaluated in the following sections. In case of approval of the experiment, indeed the project could be inserted in the DAFNE-TF (DAFNE Test Facility) program that is fore-seen after the 2020 for the following 3-5 years.