A novel concept of controlled halo removal for intense high-energy beams in storage rings and colliders is presented. It is based on the interaction of the circulating beam with a 5-keV, magnetically confined, pulsed hollow electron beam in a 2-m-long section of the ring. The electrons enclose the circulating beam, kicking halo particles transversely and leaving the beam core unperturbed. By acting as a tunable diffusion enhancer and not as a hard aperture limitation, the hollow electron beam collimator extends conventional collimation systems beyond the intensity limits imposed by tolerable losses. The concept was tested experimentally at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider. The first results on the collimation of 980-GeV antiprotons are presented.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) uses a multi-stage collimator system to absorb the growing halo of circulating beams to protect and ensure reliable operation of superconducting magnets. A similar system is planned for the Future Circular Collider (FCC). In anticipation of the LHC operation with high luminosity, research is being conducted to improve the collimation system. Studies have shown that one of the solutions to improve beam collimation is to use channeling in a short curved crystal, which acts as a primary collimator, throwing particles deep into the secondary collimator by channeling…
Protons and heavy-ion beams at unprecedented energies are brought into collisions in the CERN Large Hadron Collider for high-energy experiments. The LHC multi-stage collimation system is designed to provide protection against regular and abnormal losses in order to reduce the risk of quenches of the superconducting magnets as well as keeping background in the experiments under control. Compared to protons, beam collimation in the heavy-ion runs is more challenging despite the lower stored beam energies, because the efficiency of cleaning with heavy ions has been observed to be two orders of ma…
In the scope of the Physics Beyond Colliders studies, the Gamma-Factory initiative proposes the use of partially stripped ions as a driver of a new type of high-intensity photon source in CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In 2018, the LHC accelerated and stored partially stripped $^{208}\text{Pb}^{81+}$ ions for the first time. The collimation system efficiency recorded during this test was found to be prohibitively low, so that only a very low-intensity beam could be stored without the risk of triggering a beam dump when regular, minor beam losses occur. The worst losses were localised in the…
Ultra-relativistic hollow electron beams can drive plasma wakefields ($\sim$ GV/m) suitable for positron acceleration. Stable propagation of hollow electron beams for long distances in plasmas is required to accelerate positrons to high energies by these plasma wakefields. In this work, we show by quasi-static kinetic simulations using the code WAKE that an ultra-relativistic azimuthally-symmetric hollow electron beam propagates in a plasma by developing fish-bone like structure and shifting its bulk, differentially along its length (rear part fastest), towards its axis due to the decrease in …
We present the results of numerical simulations and experimental studies about the effects of resonant and random excitations on proton losses, emittances, and beam distributions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to shedding light on complex nonlinear effects, these studies are applied to the design of hollow electron lenses (HEL) for active beam halo control. In the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), a considerable amount of energy will be stored in the beam tails. To control and clean the beam halo, the installation of two hollow electron lenses, one per beam, is b…
Mitigation of beam backgrounds via collimators is critical for the success of the Belle~II experiment at the SuperKEKB electron-positron collider. We report on an improved simulation methodology, which includes a refined physical description of the collimators and beam pipe, our first implementation of collimator tip scattering, and in which the existing beam particle tracking software has been embedded into a new sequential tracking framework. These improvements resolve longstanding discrepancies between measured and predicted Belle~II background levels, and significantly reduce the computing…
We propose a novel positron beam loading regime in a hollow plasma channel that can efficiently accelerate $e^+$ beam with high gradient and narrow energy spread. In this regime, the $e^+$ beam coincides with the drive $e^-$ beam in time and space and their net current distribution determines the plasma wakefields. By precisely shaping the beam current profile and loading phase according to explicit expressions, three-dimensional Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations show that the acceleration for $e^+$ beam of $\sim$nC charge with $\sim$GV/m gradient, $\lesssim$0.5% induced energy spread and $\s…
In order to handle extremely-high stored energy in future proton-proton colliders, an extremely high-efficiency collimation system is required for safe operation. At LHC, the major limiting locations in terms of particle losses on superconducting (SC) magnets are the dispersion suppressors (DS) downstream of the transverse collimation insertion. These losses are due to the protons experiencing single diffractive interactions in the primary collimators. How to solve this problem is very important for future proton-proton colliders, such as the FCC-hh and SPPC. In this article, a novel method is…
Plasma wakefield acceleration in the blowout regime is particularly promising for high-energy acceleration of electron beams because of its potential to simultaneously provide large acceleration gradients and high energy transfer efficiency while maintaining excellent beam quality. However, no equivalent regime for positron acceleration in plasma wakes has been discovered to-date. We show that after a short propagation distance, an asymmetric electron beam drives a stable wakefield in a hollow plasma channel that can be both accelerating and focusing for a positron beam. A high charge positron…
Hollow plasma channels are attractive for lepton acceleration because they provide intrinsic emittance preservation regimes. However, beam breakup instabilities dominate the dynamics. Here, we show that thin, warm hollow channels can sustain large-amplitude plasma waves ready for high-quality positron acceleration. We verify that the combination of warm electrons and thin hollow channel enables positron focusing structures. Such focusing wakefields unlock beam breakup damping mechanisms. We demonstrate that such channels emerge self-consistently during the long-term plasma dynamics in the blow…
Plasma-based electron and positron wakefield acceleration has made great strides in the past decade. However one major challenge for its applications to coherent light sources and colliders is the relatively large energy spread of the accelerated beams, currently at a few percent level. This energy spread is usually correlated with particle position in the beam arising from the longitudinal chirp of the wakefield amplitude. Therefore a dechirper is highly desirable for reducing this spread down to $\sim0.1\%$ level, while at the same time for maintaining the emittance of the accelerated beam. …
