Experimental Investigations of Beam Driven Plasma Wakefield Accelerators

A plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA) uses a plasma wave (a wake) to accelerate electrons at a gradient that is three orders of magnitude higher than that of a conventional accelerator. When the plasma wave is driven by a high-density particle beam or a high-intensity laser pulse, it evolves into the nonlinear blowout regime, where the driver expels the background plasma electrons, resulting in an ion cavity forming behind the driver. This ion cavity has ideal properties for accelerating and focusing electrons. One method to insert electrons into this highly-relativistic, transient structure is by ionization injection. In this method, electrons resulting from further ionization of the ions inside the wake are trapped and accelerated by the wakefield. These injected electrons absorb the energy of the wake, resulting in a reduced accelerating field amplitude; this phenomenon is known as beam loading.This thesis discusses experiments that demonstrate how ionization injection can, on the one hand, lead to excessive beam loading and be a detriment to a PWFA, while on the other hand, it may be taken advantage of to produce bright electron beams that will be necessary for applications of a PWFA to a free electron laser (FEL) or a collider. These experiments were part of the FACET Campaign at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and used FACET’s 3 nC, 20.35 GeV electron beam to field ionize the plasma source and drive a wake.In the first experiment, the plasma source was a 30 cm column of rubidium (Rb) vapor. The low ionization potential and high atomic mass of Rb made it a suitable candidate as a plasma source for a PWFA. However, the low ionization potential of the Rb+ ion resulted in continuous ionization of Rb+ and injection of electrons along the length of the plasma. This resulted in heavy beam-loading, which reduced the strength of the accelerating field by half, making the Rb source unusable for a PWFA.In the second experiment, the plasma source was a column of lithium (Li) vapor bound by cold helium (He) gas. Here, the ionization injection of He electrons in the 10 cm boundary region between Li and He led to localized beam loading and resulted in an accelerated electron beam with high energy (32 GeV), a 10% energy spread, and an emittance an order of magnitude smaller than the drive beam. Particle-in-cell simulations indicate that the beam loading can be further optimized by reducing the injection region even more, which can lead to bright, high-current, low-energy-spread electron beams.

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