Energy spread minimization in a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator
Abstract
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 results of a beam-driven plasma acceleration experiment where we used an electron bunch as a driver followed by an ultra-short witness. The experiment demonstrates, for the first time, an innovative method to achieve an ultra-low energy spread of the accelerated witness of about 0.1%. This is an order of magnitude smaller than what has been obtained so far. The result can lead to a major breakthrough toward the optimization of the plasma acceleration process and its implementation in forthcoming compact machines for user-oriented applications.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.01676,
title = {Energy spread minimization in a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator},
author = {R. Pompili and M. P. Anania and M. Behtouei and M. Bellaveglia and A. Biagioni and F. G. Bisesto and M. Cesarini and E. Chiadroni and A. Cianchi and G. Costa and M. Croia and A. Del Dotto and D. Di Giovenale and M. Diomede and F. Dipace and M. Ferrario and A. Giribono and V. Lollo and L. Magnisi and M. Marongiu and A. Mostacci and G. Di Pirro and S. Romeo and A. R. Rossi and J. Scifo and V. Shpakov and C. Vaccarezza and F. Villa and A. Zigler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.01676},
year = {2021}
}