Tech-X (United Kingdom)

Plasma-based charged particle accelerators have been intensively investigated in the past three decades due to their capability to open up new horizons in accelerator science and particle physics yielding electric field accelerating gradient more than three orders of magnitudes higher than in conventional devices. At the current stage the most advanced and reliable mechanism for accelerating electrons is based on the propagation of an intense laser pulse or a relativistic electron beam in a low density gaseous target. In this paper we concentrate on the electron beam-driven plasma wake-field acceleration and demonstrate using 3D PiC simulations that a train of electron micro-bunches with ∼10 fs period can be generated behind the driving beam propagating in a density down-ramp. We will discuss the conditions and properties of the micro-bunches generated aiming at understanding and study of multi-bunch mechanism of injection. It is show that the periodicity and duration of micro-bunches can be controlled by adjusting the plasma density gradient and driving beam charge.

This paper investigates numerically dual-grating dielectric laser-driven accelerators driven by a pulse-front-tilted (PFT) laser, which extends the interaction length and boosts the electrons' energy gain. The optical system necessary to generate PFT laser beams with an ultrashort pulse duration of 100fs is also studied in detail. Through two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we show that such a PFT laser effectively increases the energy gain by (91±25) % compared to that of a normally incident laser with a waist radius of 50μm for a 100-period dual-grating structure.

Plasma accelerators support accelerating fields of 10-100’s of GV/m over meter-scale distances and routinely produce femtosecond-scale, multi-kA electron bunches. The so called Trojan Horse underdense photocathode plasma wakefield acceleration scheme combines state-of-the-art accelerator technology with laser and plasma methods and paves the way to improve beam quality as regards emittance and energy spread by many orders of magnitude. Electron beam brightness levels exceeding 1020 Am-2 rad-2 may be reached, and the tunability allows for multi-GeV energies, designer bunches and energy spreads <0.05% in a single plasma accelerator stage. The talk will present results of the international E210 multi-year experimental program at SLAC FACET, which cul-minated in successful first demonstration of the Trojan Horse method during FACET’s final experimental run in 2016. Enabling implications for applications, including high performance plasma-based 5th generation light sources such as hard x-ray FEL’s, for which preliminary start-to-end simulations are presented, and for high energy physics are discussed.

A plasma beam dump uses the collective oscillations of plasma electrons to absorb the kinetic energy of a particle beam. In this paper, a modified passive plasma beam dump scheme is proposed using either a gradient or stepped plasma profile to maintain a higher decelerating gradient compared with a uniform plasma. The improvement is a result of the plasma wavelength change preventing the re-acceleration of low energy particles. Particle-in-cell simulation results show that both stepped and gradient plasma profiles can achieve improved energy loss compared with a uniform plasma for an electron bunch of parameters routinely achieved in laser wakefield acceleration.

We propose a Plasma Accelerator Research Station (PARS) based at proposed FEL test facility CLARA (Compact Linear Accelerator for Research and Applications) at Daresbury Laboratory. The idea is to use the relativistic electron beam from CLARA, to investigate some key issues in electron beam transport and in electron beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration, e.g. high gradient plasma wakefield excitation driven by a relativistic electron bunch, two bunch experiment for CLARA beam energy doubling, high transformer ratio, long bunch self-modulation and some other advanced beam dynamics issues. This paper presents the feasibility studies of electron beam transport to meet the requirements for beam driven wakefield acceleration and presents the plasma wakefield simulation results based on CLARA beam parameters. Other possible experiments which can be conducted at the PARS beam line are also discussed.

As space missions involving Hall thrusters become more extended, establishing valid lifetime predictions becomes important. A combination of the use of a kinetic plasma code and a molecular dynamics code is presented for a Hall thruster channel wall erosion modeling over time. The kinetic plasma model simulates the thruster channel plasma of an SPT-100 thruster to calculate the ion flux to the walls. The molecular dynamics model simulates the sputtering of boron nitride to calculate sputter yields. A comparison of sample erosion profiles with experimental data is performed. The importance of secondary electron emission from the channel walls and its importance in the channel wall erosion processes are also investigated.