We discovered a novel effect that can cause witness emittance growth in plasma wakefield accelerators. The effect appears in linear or moderately nonlinear plasma waves. The witness experiences a time-varying focusing force and loses quality during the time required for the drive beam to reach transverse equilibrium with the plasma wave. The higher the witness charge, the lower the emittance growth rate because of additional focusing of the witness by its own wakefield. However, the witness head always degrades, and the boundary between degraded and intact parts gradually propagates backward along the witness bunch.
The initial beam emittance determines the maximum wakefield amplitude that can be reached as a result of beam self-modulation in the plasma. The wakefield excited by the fully self-modulated beam decreases linearly with the increase of the beam emittance. There is a value of initial emittance beyond which the self-modulation does not develop even if the instability is initiated by a strong seed perturbation. The emittance scale at which the wakefield is twice suppressed with respect to the zero-emittance case (the so called critical emittance) is determined by inability of the excited wave to …
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 …
A framework for integrating transfer matrices with particle-in-cell simulations is developed for TeV staging of plasma wakefield accelerators. Using nonlinear transfer matrices in terms up to ninth order in normalized energy spread $\sqrt{\langleδγ^2\rangle}$ and deriving a compact expression for the chromatic emittance growth in terms of the nonlinear matrix, plasma wakefield accelerating stages simulated using the three-dimensional particle-in-cell framework OSIRIS 4.0 were combined to model acceleration of an electron beam from 10 GeV to 1 TeV in 85 plasma stages of meter scale-length with …
In the Phase 2 of the AWAKE first experimental run (from May to November 2018), an electron beam was used to probe and test proton-driven wakefield acceleration in a rubidium plasma column. In this work, we analyze the overall charge capture and shot-to-shot reproducibility of the proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerator with various electron bunch injection parameters. The witness electron bunches were produced using an RF-gun equipped with a Cs2Te photocathode illuminated by a tailorable ultrafast deep ultraviolet (UV) laser pulse. The construction of the UV beam optical system enabled app…
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 $μ$m can be achieved within a short distance using a 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 drive beam and witness electr…
Ionization injection in a plasma wakefield accelerator was investigated experimentally using two lithium plasma sources of different lengths. The ionization of the helium gas, used to confine the lithium, injects electrons in the wake. After acceleration, these injected electrons were observed as a distinct group from the drive beam on the energy spectrometer. They typically have a charge of tens of pC, an energy spread of a few GeV, and a maximum energy of up to 30 GeV. The emittance of this group of electrons can be many times smaller than the initial emittance of the drive beam. The energy …
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 $λ$ have larger/smaller ponderomotive potential ($\propto I λ^2$). The two color scheme utilizes this property to separate the injection process from the wakefield excitation process.…
We propose and use a technique to measure the transverse emittance of a laser-wakefield accelerated beam of relativistic electrons. The technique is based on the simultaneous measurements of the electron beam divergence given by $v_{\perp}/v_{\parallel}$, the measured longitudinal spectrum $γ_\parallel$ and the transverse electron bunch size in the bubble $r_{\perp}$. The latter is obtained via the measurement of the source size of the x-rays emitted by the accelerating electron bunch in the bubble. We measure a \textit{normalised} RMS beam transverse emittance $<0.5$ $π$ mm$\:$mrad as an uppe…
A new electron injection scheme is proposed in sub-relativistic plasma wakefield accelerators. A transverse laser ionizes a dopant gas and ponderomotively accelerates the released electrons in the direction of wake propagation. This process enables electron trapping in the wakefield even for a wakefield potential below the trapping threshold. We study the scheme theoretically and by means of particle-in-cell simulations to demonstrate high-quality beam formation and acceleration with sub-micrometer normalized emittances and sub-percent uncorrelated energy spreads.
The production of ultra-bright electron bunches using ionization injection triggered by two transversely colliding laser pulses inside a beam-driven plasma wake is examined via three-dimensional (3D) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. The relatively low intensity lasers are polarized along the wake axis and overlap with the wake for a very short time. The result is that the residual momentum of the ionized electrons in the transverse plane of the wake is much reduced and the injection is localized along the propagation axis of the wake. This minimizes both the initial 'thermal' emittance and …
Particle acceleration in a quasilinear plasma wake provides access to high acceleration gradients while avoiding self-trapping of the background electrons. However, the plasma response to the externally injected witness bunch leads to a variation of the focussing fields along the bunch length, which can lead to a emittance growth. In order to investigate the impact of this emittance growth on the overall beam quality, we develop a single figure of merit based on a potential high-energy application for the AWAKE experiment at CERN. We show that the development of such a figure of merit naturall…
By means of hollow plasma, multiple proton bunches work well in driving nonlinear plasma wakefields and accelerate electrons to energy frontier with preserved beam quality. However, the acceleration of positrons is different because the accelerating structure is strongly charge dependent. There is a discrepancy between keeping a small normalized emittance and a small energy spread. This results from the conflict that the plasma electrons used to provide focusing to the multiple proton bunches dilute the positron bunch. By loading an extra electron bunch to repel the plasma electrons and meanwh…
Tolerances to driver-witness misalignment in a quasilinear plasma wakefield accelerator
Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫海因里希·海涅大学）；Max-Planck-Institut für Physik（马克斯·普朗克物理研究所）；Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics（布德克尔核物理研究所）；Novosibirsk State University（新西伯利亚国立大学）
The dependence of wakefield amplitude and phase on beam and plasma parameters is studied in the parameter area of interest for self-modulating proton beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration. The wakefield sensitivity to small parameter variations reveals the expected level of shot-to-shot jitter of experimental results. Of all the parameters, the plasma density stands out, as the wakefield phase is extremely sensitive to this parameter. The study of large variations determines the effects that limit the achievable accelerating field in different parts of the parameter space: nonlinear elonga…
Drive particle beams in linear or weakly nonlinear regimes of the plasma wakefield accelerator quickly reach a radial equilibrium with the wakefield, which is described in detail for the first time. The equilibrium beam state and self-consistent wakefields are obtained by combining analytical relationships, numerical integration, and first-principle simulations. In the equilibrium state, the beam density is strongly peaked near the axis, the beam radius is constant along the beam, and longitudinal variation of the focusing strength is balanced by varying beam emittance. The transverse momentum…
Accelerating particles to high energies in plasma wakefields is considered to be a promising technique with good energy efficiency and high gradient. While important progress has been made in plasma-based electron acceleration, positron acceleration in plasma has been scarcely studied and a fully self-consistent and optimal scenario has not yet been identified. For high energy physics applications where an electron-positron collider would be desired, the ability to accelerate positrons in plasma wakefields is however paramount. Here we show that the preservation of beam quality can be compromi…
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 regim…
We propose an innovative beam cooling scheme based on laser driven plasma wakefields to address the challenge of high luminosity generation for a future linear collider. For linear colliders, beam cooling is realised by means of damping rings equipped with wiggler magnets and accelerating cavities. This scheme ensures systematic reduction of phase space volume through synchrotron radiation emission whilst compensating for longitudinal momentum loss via an accelerating cavity. In this paper, the concept of a plasma wiggler and its effective model analogous to a magnetic wiggler are introduced; …
A new injection scheme using the interference of two coaxial laser pulses is proposed for generating high quality beams in laser wakefield accelerators. In this scheme, a relatively loosely focused laser pulse drives the plasma wakefield, and a tightly focused laser pulse with similar intensity triggers interference ring pattern which creates onion-like multi sheaths in the plasma wakefield. Due to the wavefront curvature change after the focal position of the tightly focused laser, the innermost sheath of the wakefield expands, which slows down the effective phase velocity of the wakefield an…
We propose to use a frequency doubled pulse colliding with the driving pulse at an acute angle to trigger ionization injection in a laser wakefield accelerator. This scheme effectively reduces the duration that injection occurs, thus high injection quality is obtained. Three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that electron beams with energy of ~500 MeV, charge of ~40 pC, energy spread of ~1% and normalized emittance of a few millimeter milliradian can be produced by ~100 TW laser pulses. By adjusting the angle between the two pulses, the intensity of the trigger pulse and the gas do…
In AWAKE a self-modulated proton bunch drives wakefields in a plasma. Recent experiments successfully demonstrated many aspects of the self-modulation of the drive bunch as well as acceleration of test electrons. Next experiments will focus on producing a multi-GeV accelerated electron bunch with low emittance and low energy spread. The experiment requires a variety of advanced beam diagnostics to characterize the self-modulated proton bunch at the picosecond time scale. These include optical transition radiation and a streak camera for short and long time scale detailed imaging of self-modula…
It is shown that co-linear injection of electrons or positrons into the wakefield of the self-modulating particle beam is possible and ensures high energy gain. The witness beam must co-propagate with the tail part of the driver, since the plasma wave phase velocity there can exceed the light velocity, which is necessary for efficient acceleration. If the witness beam is many wakefield periods long, then the trapped charge is limited by beam loading effects. The initial trapping is better for positrons, but at the acceleration stage a considerable fraction of positrons is lost from the wave. F…
A near-hollow plasma channel, where the plasma density in the channel is much less than the plasma density in the walls, is proposed to provide independent control over the focusing and accelerating forces in a plasma accelerator. In this geometry the low density in the channel contributes to the focusing forces, while the accelerating fields are determined by the high density in the channel walls. The channel also provides guiding for intense laser pulses used for wakefield excitation. In certain regimes, both electron and positron beams can be accelerated and focused in a nearly symmetric fa…
Plasma wakefields can enable very high accelerating gradients for frontier high energy particle accelerators, in excess of 10 GeV/m. To overcome limits on total acceleration achievable, specially shaped drive beams can be used in both linear and nonlinear plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA), to increase the transformer ratio, implying that the drive beam deceleration is minimized relative to acceleration obtained in the wake. In this Letter, we report the results of a nonlinear PWFA, high transformer ratio experiment using high-charge, longitudinally asymmetric drive beams in a plasma cell. A…
A linear theory of a wakefield excitation in a plasma-dielectric accelerating structure by a drive electron bunch in the case of an off-axis bunch injection has been constructed. The structure under investigation is a round dielectric-loaded metal waveguide with a channel for the charged particles, filled with homogeneous cold plasma. Derived theory was used to investigate numerically the spatial distribution of the bunch-excited wakefield components, which act on both the drive and witness bunches.
Ultra-low emittance (tens of nm) beams can be generated in a plasma accelerator using ionization injection of electrons into a wakefield. An all-optical method of beam generation uses two laser pulses of different colors. A long-wavelength drive laser pulse (with a large ponderomotive force and small peak electric field) is used to excite a large wakefield without fully ionizing a gas, and a short-wavelength injection laser pulse (with a small ponderomotive force and large peak electric field), co-propagating and delayed with respect to the pump laser, to ionize a fraction of the remaining bou…
Wake Perturbations in Laser- and Beam-Driven Plasma Wakefield Accelerators: A Symmetry-Based Multipole Classification
Extreme Light Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP)（极光大设施核物理部）；Horia Hulubei National Institute for R&D in Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN-HH)（霍里亚·胡利贝伊物理与核工程研发国家研究所）；INFN – Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati（意大利国家核物理研究所弗拉斯卡蒂国家实验室）
Using a periodic electron beam bunch train to resonantly excite plasma wakefields in the quasi-nonlinear (QNL) regime has distinct advantages over employing a single, higher charge bunch. Resonant excitation in the QNL regime can produce plasma electron blowout using very low emittance beams with a small charge per pulse: the local density perturbation is extremely nonlinear, achieving total rarefaction, yet the resonant response of the plasma electrons at the plasma frequency is preserved. Such a pulse train, with inter-bunch spacing equal to the plasma period, can be produced via inverse fre…
Emittance exchange beamlines employ transverse masks to create drive and witness beams of variable longitudinal profile and bunch spacing. Recently, this approach has been used to create advanced driver profiles and demonstrate record-breaking plasma wakefield transformer ratios [Roussel, R., et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 044802 (2020)], a crucial advancement for efficient witness acceleration. However, since the transverse masks are individually laser cut and installed into the UHV beamline, refinement of the beam profiles is not possible without replacing masks. Instead, this work proposes t…
Laser and beam driven wakefields promise orders of magnitude increases in electric field gradients for particle accelerators for future applications. Key areas to explore include the emittance properties of the generated beams and overcoming the dephasing limit in the plasma. In this paper, the first in-depth study of the self-injection mechanism into wakefield structures from non-homogeneous cluster plasmas is provided using high-resolution two dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. The clusters which are typical structures caused by ejection of gases from a high-pressure gas jet have a di…
Recent initiatives in ultra-short, GeV electron beam generation have focused on achieving sub-fs pulses for driving X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) in single-spike mode. This scheme employs very low charge beams, which may allow existing FEL injectors to produce few-100 as pulses, with high brightness. Towards this end, recent experiments at SLAC have produced ~2 fs rms, low transverse emittance, 20 pC electron pulses. Here we examine use of such pulses to excite plasma wakefields exceeding 1 TV/m. We present a focusing scheme capable of producing ~200 nm beam sizes, where the surface Coulom…
We propose a new and simple strategy for controlled ionization-induced trapping of electrons in a beam-driven plasma accelerator. The presented method directly exploits electric wakefields to ionize electrons from a dopant gas and capture them into a well-defined volume of the accelerating and focusing wake phase, leading to high-quality witness-bunches. This injection principle is explained by example of three-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) calculations using the code OSIRIS. In these simulations a high-current-density electron-beam driver excites plasma waves in the blow-out regime insid…
Available analytical wakefield models for the bubble and the blow-out regime of electron-plasma acceleration perfectly describe important features like shape, fields, trapping ratio, achievable energy, energy distribution and radial emittance. As we show, for wakefields with an extremely small amplitude these models fail to describe the accelerating electric field and its divergence in the wakefield rear. Since prominent parameter regimes like the Trojan horse regime of photocathode injection exhibit this feature, it is of great importance to work out analytical models that fix this problem; o…
We present a detailed analysis of the features and capabilities of Wakefield-Induced Ionization (WII) injection in the blowout regime of beam driven plasma accelerators. This mechanism exploits the electric wakefields to ionize electrons from a dopant gas and trap them in a well-defined region of the accelerating and focusing wake phase, leading to the formation of high-quality witness-bunches [Martinez de la Ossa et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 245003 (2013)]. The electron-beam drivers must feature high-peak currents ($I_b^0\gtrsim 8.5~\mathrm{kA}$) and a duration comparable to the plasma wavel…
Simulations of proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerators have demonstrated substantially higher accelerating gradients compared to conventional accelerators and the viability of accelerating electrons to the energy frontier in a single plasma stage. However, due to the strong intrinsic transverse fields varying both radially and in time, the witness beam quality is still far from suitable for practical application in future colliders. Here we demonstrate efficient acceleration of electrons in proton-driven wakefields in a hollow plasma channel. In this regime, the witness bunch is positioned…
A new scheme for accelerating positively charged particles in a plasma wakefield accelerator is proposed. If the proton drive beam propagates in a hollow plasma channel, and the beam radius is of order of the channel width, the space charge force of the driver causes charge separation at the channel wall, which helps to focus the positively charged witness bunch propagating along the beam axis. In the channel, the acceleration buckets for positively charged particles are much larger than in the blowout regime of the uniform plasma, and stable acceleration over long distances is possible. In ad…
A new concept is proposed for accelerating positrons in a nonlinear plasma wakefield accelerator. By loading the wakefield (back of the plasma bubble) with a short electron bunch, an extended area of excessive plasma electron accumulation is created after the first bubble, resulting in a favorable region with simultaneous focusing and accelerating fields for positrons. Scaling laws for optimized loading parameters are obtained through extensive parameters scans. Owing to the good quality of the focusing field, positron acceleration with emittance preservation can be achieved in this new regime…
This paper describes the utilization of beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration to implement a high-quality plasma cathode via density-downramp injection in a short injector stage at the FLASHForward facility at DESY. Electron beams with charge of up to 105 pC and energy spread of a few percent were accelerated by a tunable effective accelerating field of up to 2.7 GV/m. The plasma cathode was operated drift-free with very high injection efficiency. Sources of jitter, the emittance and divergence of the resulting beam were investigated and modeled, as were strategies for performance improvem…
Plasma Wakefield Acceleration represents one of the most promising techniques able to overcome the limits of conventional RF technology and make possible the development of compact accelerators. With respect to the laser-driven schemes, the beam-driven scenario is not limited by diffraction and dephasing issues, thus it allows to achieve larger acceleration lengths. One of the most prominent drawback, conversely, occurs at the end of the acceleration process and consists of removing the depleted high-charge driver while preserving the main features (emittance and peak current) of the accelerat…
We analyze the equilibrium configuration for a modulated beam with sharp boundaries exposed to the fields self-generated by the interaction with a plasma. Through a semi-analytical approach we show the presence of multiple equilibrium configurations and we determine the one more suitable for wakefield excitation. Once pointed out the absence of confinement for the front of the beam and the consequently divergence driven by the emittance, we study the evolution of the equilibrium configuration while propagating in the plasma, discarding all the others time-dependencies. We show the onset of a r…
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 re…
Hollow plasma has been introduced into the proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerators to overcome the issue of beam quality degradation caused by the nonlinear transverse wakefields varying in radius and time in uniform plasma. It has been demonstrated in simulations that the electrons can be accelerated to energy frontier with well-preserved beam quality in a long hollow plasma channel. However, this scheme imposes tight requirements on the beam-channel alignment. Otherwise asymmetric transverse wakefields along the axis are induced, which could distort the driving bunch and deteriorate the …
A future plasma based linear collider has the potential to reach unprecedented energies and transform our understanding of high energy physics. The extremely dense beams in such a device would cause the plasma ions to fall toward the axis. For more mild ion motion, this introduces a nonlinear perturbation to the focusing fields inside of the bubble. However, for extreme ion motion, the ion distribution collapses to a quasi-equilibrium characterized by a thin filament of extreme density on the axis which generates strong, nonlinear focusing fields. These fields can provoke unacceptable emittanc…
