USC, Los Angeles, California, USA
UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA
In the non-linear or blow-out regime of a plasma wakefield, the electrons of the accelerated bunch oscillate in a pure ion column. It was demonstrated that a single bunch can emit betatron radiation in the keV to MeV range*. In a drive/witness bunch system, the witness bunch can be injected into the ion column with a transverse momentum or initial radial offset, so that the whole bunch oscillates about the column axis as one marcro-electron. This results in a larger emitted power and higher photon energy. The energy loss due to radiation can be compensated for by the energy gain from the wakefield so that the emission process can be sustained over long distance. Detailed results will be presented about the characteristics of the witness bunch oscillations and radiation through numerical simulations** and calculations.
* S.Q. Wang, et al., Phys. Rev.Let., 88(13), 135004,(2002), D. K. Johnson et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97(17), 175003, (2006)
** C.H. Huang, et al., J. Comp. Phys., 217(2), 658, (2006)
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA
USC, Los Angeles, California, USA
FACET, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator and Experimental Tests, is a new facility being constructed in sector 20 of the SLAC linac primarily to study beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration beginning in summer 2011. The nominal FACET parameters are 23GeV, 3nC electron bunches compressed to ~20μm long and focused to ~10μm wide. The intense fields of the FACET bunches will be used to field ionize neutral lithium or cesium vapor produced in a heat pipe oven. Previous experiments at SLAC demonstrated 50GeV/m gradients in an 85cm field ionized lithium plasma where the interaction distance was limited by head erosion. Simulations indicate the lower ionization potential of cesium will decrease the rate of head erosion and increase single stage performance. The initial experimental program will compare the performance of lithium and cesium plasma sources with single and double bunches. Later experiments will investigate improved performance with a pre-ionized cesium plasma. The status of the experiments and expected performance are reviewed.
