Plasma-based particle sources

Journal of Instrumentation, vol. 19, pp. T01004

Abstract

Abstract High-brightness particle beams generated by advanced accelerator concepts have the potential to become an essential part of future accelerator technology. In particular, high-gradient accelerators can generate and rapidly accelerate particle beams to relativistic energies. The rapid acceleration and strong confining fields can minimize irreversible detrimental effects to the beam brightness that occur at low beam energies, such as emittance growth or pulse elongation caused by space charge forces. Due to the high accelerating gradients, these novel accelerators are also significantly more compact than conventional technology. Advanced accelerators can be extremely variable and are capable of generating particle beams with vastly different properties using the same driver and setup with only modest changes to the interaction parameters. So far, efforts have mainly been focused on the generation of electron beams, but there are concepts to extend the sources to generate spin-polarized electron beams or positron beams. The beam parameters of these particle sources are largely determined by the injection and subsequent acceleration processes. Although, over the last decade there has been significant progress, the sources are still lacking a sufficiently high 6-dimensional (D) phase-space density that includes small transverse emittance, small energy spread and high charge, and operation at high repetition rate. This is required for future particle colliders with a sufficiently high luminosity or for more near-term applications, such as enabling the operation of free-electron lasers (FELs) in the X-ray regime. Major research and development efforts are required to address these limitations in order to realize these approaches for a front-end injector for a future collider or next-generation light sources. In particular, this includes methods to control and manipulate the phase-space and spin degrees-of-freedom of ultrashort plasma-based electron bunches with high accuracy, and methods that increase efficiency and repetition rate. These efforts also include the development of high-resolution diagnostics, such as full 6D phase-space measurements, beam polarimetry and high-fidelity simulation tools. A further increase in beam luminosity can be achieve through emittance damping. Emittance cooling via the emission of synchrotron radiation using current technology requires kilometer-scale damping rings. For future colliders, the damping rings might be replaced by a substantially more compact plasma-based approach. Here, plasma wigglers with significantly stronger magnetic fields are used instead of permanent-magnet based wigglers to achieve similar damping performance but over a two orders of magnitude reduced length.

Authors 12

1. M. Fuchs corresponding

   University of Nebraska–Lincoln

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588, U.S.A

2. G. Andonian

   University of California, Los Angeles

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, U.S.A

3. Ö. Apsimon

   University of Manchester

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Manchester, M13 9PL, Manchester, U.K

4. M. Büscher

   Forschungszentrum Jülich · Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

   Affiliation as printed

   Institut für Laser- und Plasmaphysik, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

   Peter Grünberg Institut (PGI-6), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany

5. M. C. Downer

   The University of Texas at Austin

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Physics, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, U.S.A

6. D. Filippetto

   Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

   Affiliation as printed

   Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, U.S.A

7. A. Lehrach Aachen JARA-FAME (Forces and Matter Experiments)

   Forschungszentrum Jülich · Jülich Aachen Research Alliance · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institut für Kernphysik (IKP-4), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany

   JARA-FAME (Forces and Matter Experiments), Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

8. Carl B. Schroeder

   Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

   Affiliation as printed

   Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, U.S.A

9. B. A. Shadwick

   University of Nebraska–Lincoln

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588, U.S.A

10. Alexander G. R. Thomas

    University of Michigan

    Affiliation as printed

    Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences and Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, U.S.A

11. Navid Vafaei-Najafabadi

    Stony Brook University

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794, U.S.A

12. Guoxing Xia

    University of Manchester

    Affiliation as printed

    University of Manchester, M13 9PL, Manchester, U.K