Dielectric wakefield acceleration (DWA) is a high gradient novel acceleration concept. To realise this concept for future high energy facilities, scalable models of the transverse and longitudinal beam dynamics from these wakefields must be created and experimentally verified. We present a summary of results from the recent experimental run at the CLARA facility. This study used both circular and planar quartz DWA structures and was performed with 100 pC bunch charge and 35 MeV beam energy. The effect of dipole-like and quadrupole-like wakefields from both structures were studied in detail for a variety of beam distributions. These results were used for the benchmarking a highly scalable simulation code which was developed in-house.

For the purpose of indirect search of dark matter, we designed laterally driven Dielectric Laser Acceleration (DLA) structure that achieves 1.2 MeV energy gain in 6 mm length together with 6D confinement. The design originated from a relativistic DLA structure and was supplemented with non-homogeneous shapes following the APF segments and optimized using a genetic algorithm together with the DLAtrack6D tracker. The achieved throughput could be increased to 98%.

For the first time, photoemission of spin-polarized electron beams from gallium nitride (GaN) photocathodes are observed and characterized. The spin polarizations of the emitted electrons from epitaxially grown hexagonal and cubic GaN photocathodes activated to Negative Electron Affinity (NEA) via cesium deposition are measured in a retarding-field Mott polarimeter.