Recent electron beam driven plasma wakefield accelerator results

by Patric Muggli (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA)

Thursday 7 Oct 2004, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

SL Auditorium (CERN)

Plasma accelerators have made very significant progress in the last year. In particular, the 1 GeV energy gain barrier has been broken for the first time, with an energy gain > 3 GeV over about 10 cm, and therefore a gradient > 30 GeV/m, in an electron beam driven accelerator, or plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA). In that experiment the ultra-short (< 100 fs), high current (> 15 kA) bunches of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center also created their own plasma through field ionization of a lithium vapor. This new self-ionization regime of the PWFA opens the possibility for multi-meter long, > 10**16/cm3 plasmas to be easily generated. At the same time, numerical codes have shown that an electron bunch can be accelerated by 50 GeV with a narrow energy spread over only three meters of plasma, and with no emittance growth, These and other exciting results demonstrate real progress toward the realization of a plasma accelerator module that would double the energy of a future, multi-kilometer long accelerator over only a few tens of meters. A review of recent PWFA results will be presented, and their relevance to a plasma energy doubler will be discussed.


Organiser(s): Werner Herr / AB/ABP
More information: http://cern.ch/AB-seminar/

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