Acceleration of a Positron Bunch in a Hollow Channel Plasma

Plasmas are a compelling medium for particle acceleration owing to their natural ability to sustain electric fields that are orders of magnitude larger than those available in conventional radio-frequency accelerators. Plasmas are also unique amongst accelerator technologies in that they respond dif...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2023-12
Main Authors: Gessner, Spencer, Adli, Erik, Allen, James M, An, Weiming, Clarke, Christine I, Clayton, Chris E, Corde, Sebastien, Doche, Antoine, Frederico, Joel, Green, Selina Z, Hogan, Mark J, Joshi, Chan, Lindstrom, Carl A, Litos, Michael, Marsh, Kenneth A, Mori, Warren B, O'Shea, Brendan, Vafaei-Najafabadi, Navid, Yakimenko, Vitaly
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Electric fields
Electron beams
Energy transfer
High energy electrons
Particle acceleration
Particle accelerators
Plasma
Plasma acceleration
Plasmas (physics)
Positron beams
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Summary:Plasmas are a compelling medium for particle acceleration owing to their natural ability to sustain electric fields that are orders of magnitude larger than those available in conventional radio-frequency accelerators. Plasmas are also unique amongst accelerator technologies in that they respond differently to beams of opposite charge. The asymmetric response of a plasma to highly-relativistic electron and positron beams arises from the fact that plasmas are composed of light, mobile electrons and heavy, stationary ions. Hollow channel plasma acceleration is a technique for symmetrizing the response of the plasma, such that it works equally well for high-energy electron and positron beams. In the experiment described here, we demonstrate the generation of a positron beam-driven wake in an extended, annular plasma channel, and acceleration of a second trailing witness positron bunch by the wake. The leading bunch excites the plasma wakefield and loses energy to the plasma, while the witness bunch experiences an accelerating field and gains energy, thus providing a proof-of-concept for hollow channel acceleration of positron beams. At a bunch separation of 330 um, the accelerating gradient is 70 MV/m, the transformer ratio is 0.55, and the energy transfer efficiency is 18% for a drive-to-witness beam charge ratio of 5:1.
ISSN:2331-8422