Author: Litos, M.D.
Paper Title Page
TUPEA045 Self-Modulation and Hosing Instability of Slac Electron and Positron Bunches in Plasmas 1235
 
  • J. Vieira, N.C. Lopes
    Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal
  • E. Adli, S.J. Gessner, M.J. Hogan, S.Z. Li, M.D. Litos
    SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
  • Y. Fang
    USC, Los Angeles, California, USA
  • C. Joshi, K.A. Marsh, W.B. Mori, N. Vafaei-Najafabadi
    UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA
  • P. Muggli
    MPI, Muenchen, Germany
  • O. Reimann
    MPI-P, München, Germany
  • L.O. Silva
    IPFN, Lisbon, Portugal
 
  Funding: This work has been partially supported by Humboldt Foundation.
The understanding of the self-modulation (SMI) and hosing (HI) instabilities is critical for the success of the upcoming proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiments at CERN*. The use of long SLAC electron and positron bunches provides the possibility of understanding experimentally the interplay between SMI and HI. In this work we perform particle-in-cell simulations with the code OSIRIS with parameters that will be available for experiments at SLAC in 2013. We show that the SMI of 20 GeV lepton bunches can grow and saturate in less than 15 cm. Up to 8 GeV energy gain/loss could be observed after a meter long plasma. The HI can also be effectively mitigated by seeding the SMI using bunches with short rise times**. We also show analytically and numerically that in the linear regime and after saturation of the SMI the HI can be suppressed by a plasma-BNS damping analogue. Several diagnostics that could be used in experiments to measure the SMI development and these effects are also explored.
*G. Xia et al., J. Plasma Phys., 1-7 (2012).
**J. Vieira et al., Phys. Plasmas 19, 063105 (2012).