A Dielectric Disk Accelerator (DDA) is a metallic accelerating structure loaded with dielectric disks to increase its shunt impedance. These structures use short RF pulses of 9 ns to achieve accelerating gradients of more than 100 MV/m. Single cell and multicell clamped structures have been designed and high power tested at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator. During testing, the single cell clamped DDA structure achieved an accelerating gradient of 102 MV/m with no visible damage in the RF volume region. The minimal damage that was seen outside the RF volume was likely due to RF leakage from uneven clamping during assembly. Based on the success of that experiment, a clamped multicell DDA structure has been designed and tested at high power. Simulation results for this new structure show a 108 MV/m accelerating gradient with 400 MW of input power with high shunt impedance and group velocity. Engineering designs were improved from the single cell structure for a more consistent clamping over the entire structure. Up to this point in the high power experiments, the results show a peak input power of 222 MW correlating to an accelerating gradient of 80 MV/m. Testing of this structure will continue January 2024.

Most current laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs) require driver lasers with relativistic intensities and pulse durations that are significantly shorter than the plasma wavelengths. This severely limits the laser technology that can be used to drive LPAs and with that their wide spread and the currently achievable LPA parameters, such as repetition rate and accelerating gradient. Here, we report a widely unexplored regime of laser-plasma electron acceleration that is based on the direct parametric excitation of plasma waves. This method markedly relaxes the driver laser requirements in terms of peak power and pulse duration. We show experimental data that demonstrates the generation of high-charge mildly relativistic electron bunches with laser-to-electron conversion efficiency that is unprecedented in gas-phase targets. The accelerating field gradient in this regime reach 3 TV/m. The experimental results demonstrate a novel regime that opens LPA electron acceleration for a wide range of driver laser technologies and holds the promise for a path to ultracompact high-repetition rate LPAs with extreme field gradients for future compact particle accelerators and secondary sources.

The viability of next generation, compact, TeV-class electron-positron colliders based on staging of independently-powered plasma-based accelerators relies on the possibility of accelerating high-charge bunches to high energy with high efficiency and high accelerating gradient, while maintaining a small energy spread and emittance. Achieving a small energy spread with high-efficiency requires employing witness bunches with optimally tailored current profiles (optimal beamloading). Such profiles are analytically known in the case of plasma-wakefield accelerators operating in the blowout regime, while in the case of laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs) can only by computed numerically, and their determination requires, among other things, taking into account the laser driver evolution. A small bunch energy spread is a necessary condition to enable staging and minimize emittance degradation from chromaticity when bunches are transported from one plasma accelerator stage to the following one. In this contribution we will discuss examples of LPA stages operating in different regimes, namely a self-guided stage in the nonlinear regime and a quasi-linear stage in a hollow plasma channel, providing high-gradient, high-efficiency, and quality-preserving acceleration of bunches for collider applications. We will present, for each example, the current profile distribution for optimal beamloading, and we will analyze bunch emittance degradation when staging of such LPAs is considered.