DESY, Hamburg, Germany
CFEL, Hamburg, Germany
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
DESY, Hamburg, Germany
Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
Tech-X, Boulder, Colorado, USA
TEMF, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nuernberg, University Erlangen-Nuernberg LFTE, Erlangen, Germany
PSI, Villigen PSI, Switzerland
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
CFEL, Hamburg, Germany
University of Hamburg, Institut für Experimentalphysik, Hamburg, Germany
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Dielectric laser acceleration of electrons has recently been demonstrated with significantly higher accelerating gradients than other structure-based linear accelerators. Towards the development of an integrated 1 MeV electron accelerator based on dielectric laser accelerator technologies, development in several relevant technologies is needed. In this work, recent developments on electron sources, bunching, accelerating, focussing, deflecting and laser coupling structures are reported. With an eye to the near future, components required for a 1 MeV kinetic energy tabletop accelerator producing sub-femtosecond electron bunches are outlined.
DESY, Hamburg, Germany
University of Hamburg, Institut für Experimentalphysik, Hamburg, Germany
Dielectric laser driven particle accelerators have become a research area of major interest due to the high acceleration gradients achievable. Those are mainly attributed to the high damage thresholds of dielectrics at optical frequencies. Simulations of these structures are usually computed with Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes. Their accuracy and self consistency comes with a major drawback of high computation costs. Computation of structures consistent of hundreds to thousands of periods are only viable with High Performance Computing clusters. In this proceeding a compromise of CST* PIC simulations combined with a transfer function model is presented to simulate relativistic electron accelerators for particle energies up to the GeV regime or higher. In addition a simplified example accelerator design is investigated and the required electron bunch parameters from a sub-relativistic source are computed.
*CST - Computer Simulation Technology, available from www.
cst.com.
DESY, Hamburg, Germany
University of Hamburg, Institut für Experimentalphysik, Hamburg, Germany
University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
The concept of dielectric laser accelerators (DLA) has gained increasing attention in accelerator research, because of the high achievable acceleration gradients (~GeV/m). This is due to the high damage threshold of dielectrics at optical frequencies. In the context of the Accelerator on a Chip International Program (ACHIP) we plan to inject electron bunches into a laser-illuminated dielectric grating structure. At a laser wavelength of 2 micro-meter the accelerating bucket is <1.5 fs. This requires both ultra-short bunches and highly stable laser to electron phase. We propose a scheme with intrinsic laser to electron synchronization and describe a possible implementation at the SINBAD facility (DESY). Prior to injection, the electron bunch is conditioned by interaction with an external laser field in an undulator. This generates a sinusoidal energy modulation that is transformed into periodic microbunches in a subsequent chicane. The phase synchronization is achieved by driving both the modulation process and the DLA with the same laser pulse. This allows scanning the electron bunch to laser phase and will show the dependence of the acceleration process on this delay.
DESY, Hamburg, Germany
University of Hamburg, Institut für Experimentalphysik, Hamburg, Germany
University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
In this work we present the outline of an experimental setup for dielectric laser acceleration of relativistic electron bunches produced by the ARES linac under construction at the SINBAD facility (DESY Hamburg). The experiment will be performed as part of the Accelerator on a Chip International Program (ACHIP), funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. At SINBAD we plan to test the acceleration of already pre-accelerated relativistic electron bunches in a laser-illuminated dielectric grating structure. In addition to the conceptual layout of the experiment we present first start-to-end simulation results for different ARES working points. The simulations are performed using a combination of the well known particle tracking code ASTRA and the self-consistent particle in cell code VSim.
DESY, Hamburg, Germany
University of Hamburg, Institut für Experimentalphysik, Hamburg, Germany
In order to simulate the beam dynamics in grating based Dielectric Laser Accelerators (DLA) fully self-consistent PIC codes are usually employed. These codes model the evolution of both the electromagnetic fields inside a laser-driven DLA and the beam phase space very accurately. The main drawback of these codes is that they are computationally very expensive. While the simulation of a single DLA period is feasible with these codes, long multi-period structures cannot be studied without access to HPC clusters. We present a fast particle tracking tool for the simulation of long DLA structures. DLATracker is a parallelized code based on the analytical reconstruction of the in-channel electromagnetic fields and a Boris/Vay-type particle pusher. It computational kernel is written in OpenCL and can run on both CPUs and GPUs. The main code is following a modular approach and is written in Python 2.7. This way the code can be easiliy extended for different use cases. In order to benchmark the code, simulation results are compared to results obtained with the PIC code VSim 7.2.