Plasma wakefield accelerators driven by particle beams are one promising method of advanced acceleration, with capable of providing accelerating gradient much larger than RF technology. One of the biggest remaining issues is coupling beams from one stage to another. This novel concept optimizes inter-plasma distances in a staged beam-driven plasma accelerator by drive-beam coupling in the temporal domain and gating the accelerator via a low-power, ultrashort pulse laser.

Talk will cover state-of-the-art photocathodes for bright-beam and spin-polarized-beam generation.

A multileaf collimator comprising many individually controlled blades has been used to impose predefined transverse beam shapes to an electron beam. Afterwards transverse-to-longitudinal mapping transforms this shape into a longitudinal one. This technique opens a wide field of applications using individually tailored longitudinal beam profiles.