Plasma Wakefield Experiments At Facet

FACET, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator and Experimental Tests, is a new facility being constructed in sector 20 of the SLAC linac primarily to study beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration beginning in summer 2011. The nominal FACET parameters are 23GeV, 3nC electron bunches compressed to ≈20[mu]m long and focused to ≈10[mu]m wide. The intense fields of the FACET bunches will be used to field ionize neutral lithium or cesium vapor produced in a heat pipe oven. Previous experiments at the SLAC FFTB facility demonstrated 50GeV/m gradients in an 85cm field ionized lithium plasma where the interaction distance was limited by head erosion. Simulations indicate the lower ionization potential of cesium will decrease the rate of head erosion and increase single stage performance. The initial experimental program will compare the performance of lithium and cesium plasma sources with single and double bunches. Later experiments will investigate improved performance with a pre-ionized cesium plasma. The status of the experiments and expected performance are reviewed. The FACET Facility is being constructed in sector 20 of the SLAC linac primarily to study beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration. The facility will begin commissioning in summer 2011 and conduct an experimental program over the coming five years to study electron and positron beam driven plasma acceleration with strong wake loading in the non-linear regime. The FACET experiments aim to demonstrate high-gradient acceleration of electron and positron beams with high efficiency and negligible emittance growth.

We report initial results of the Plasma Wakefield Acceleration (PWFA) Experiments performed at FACET - Facility for Advanced aCcelertor Experimental Tests at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. At FACET a 23 GeV electron beam with 1.8 x 101° electrons is compressed to 20 [mu]m longitudinally and focused down to 10 [mu]m x 10 [mu]m transverse spot size for user driven experiments. Construction of the FACET facility completed in May 2011 with a first run of user assisted commissioning throughout the summer. The first PWFA experiments will use single electron bunches combined with a high density lithium plasma to produce accelerating gradients> 10 GeV/m benchmarking the FACET beam and the newly installed experimental hardware. Future plans for further study of plasma wakefield acceleration will be reviewed. The experimental hardware and operation of the plasma heat-pipe oven have been successfully commissioned. Plasma wakefield acceleration was not observed because the electron bunch density was insufficient to ionize the lithium vapor. The remaining commissioning time in summer 2011 will be dedicated to delivering the FACET design parameters for the experimental programs which will begin in early 2012. PWFA experiments require the shorter bunches and smaller transverse sizes to create the plasma and drive large amplitude wakefields. Low emittance and high energy will minimize head erosion which was found to be a limiting factor in acceleration distance and energy gain. We will run the PWFA experiments with the design single bunch conditions in early 2012. Future PWFA experiments at FACET are discussed in [5][6] and include drive and witness bunch production for high energy beam manipulation, ramped bunch to optimize tranformer ratio, field-ionized cesium plasma, preionized plasmas, positron acceleration, etc. We will install a notch collimator for two-bunch operation as well as new beam diagnostics such as the X-band TCAV [7] to resolve the two bunches. With these new instruments and desired beam parameters in place next year, we will be able to complete the studies of plasma wakefield acceleration in the next few years.

Plasma wakefield acceleration is one of the most promising approaches to advancing accelerator technology. This approach offers a potential 1,000-fold or more increase in acceleration over a given distance, compared to existing accelerators. FACET, enabled by the Recovery Act funds, will study plasma acceleration, using short, intense pulses of electrons and positrons. In this lecture, the physics of plasma acceleration and features of FACET will be presented.

Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) in SLAC will be used to study plasma wakefield acceleration. FLUKA Monte Carlo code was used to design a maze wall to separate FACET project and LCLS project to allow persons working in FACET side during LCLS operation. Also FLUKA Monte Carlo code was used to design the shielding for FACET dump to get optimum design for shielding both prompt and residual doses, as well as reducing environmental impact. FACET will be an experimental facility that provides short, intense pulses of electrons and positrons to excite plasma wakefields and study a variety of critical issues associated with plasma wakefield acceleration [1]. This paper describes the FACET beam parameters, the lay-out and its radiological issues.

A plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA) uses a plasma wave (a wake) to accelerate electrons at a gradient that is three orders of magnitude higher than that of a conventional accelerator. When the plasma wave is driven by a high-density particle beam or a high-intensity laser pulse, it evolves into the nonlinear blowout regime, where the driver expels the background plasma electrons, resulting in an ion cavity forming behind the driver. This ion cavity has ideal properties for accelerating and focusing electrons. One method to insert electrons into this highly-relativistic, transient structure is by ionization injection. In this method, electrons resulting from further ionization of the ions inside the wake are trapped and accelerated by the wakefield. These injected electrons absorb the energy of the wake, resulting in a reduced accelerating field amplitude; this phenomenon is known as beam loading. This thesis discusses experiments that demonstrate how ionization injection can, on the one hand, lead to excessive beam loading and be a detriment to a PWFA, while on the other hand, it may be taken advantage of to produce bright electron beams that will be necessary for applications of a PWFA to a free electron laser (FEL) or a collider. These experiments were part of the FACET Campaign at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and used FACET's 3 nC, 20.35 GeV electron beam to field ionize the plasma source and drive a wake. In the first experiment, the plasma source was a 30 cm column of rubidium (Rb) vapor. The low ionization potential and high atomic mass of Rb made it a suitable candidate as a plasma source for a PWFA. However, the low ionization potential of the Rb+ ion resulted in continuous ionization of Rb+ and injection of electrons along the length of the plasma. This resulted in heavy beam-loading, which reduced the strength of the accelerating field by half, making the Rb source unusable for a PWFA. In the second experiment, the plasma source was a column of lithium (Li) vapor bound by cold helium (He) gas. Here, the ionization injection of He electrons in the 10 cm boundary region between Li and He led to localized beam loading and resulted in an accelerated electron beam with high energy (32 GeV), a 10% energy spread, and an emittance an order of magnitude smaller than the drive beam. Particle-in-cell simulations indicate that the beam loading can be further optimized by reducing the injection region even more, which can lead to bright, high-current, low-energy-spread electron beams.

Plasma wakefield acceleration has the potential to dramatically shrink the size and cost of particle accelerators. Research at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has demonstrated that plasmas can provide 1,000 times the acceleration in a given distance compared with current technologies. Developing revolutionary and more efficient acceleration techniques that allow for an affordable high-energy collider is the focus of FACET, a National User Facility at SLAC. The existing FACET National User Facility uses part of SLAC’s two-mile-long linear accelerator to generate high-density beams of electrons and positrons. FACET-II is a new test facility to develop advanced acceleration and coherent radiation techniques with high-energy electron and positron beams. It is the only facility in the world with high energy positron beams. FACET-II provides a major upgrade over current FACET capabilities and the breadth of the potential research program makes it truly unique. It will synergistically pursue accelerator science that is vital to the future of both advanced acceleration techniques for High Energy Physics, ultra-high brightness beams for Basic Energy Science, and novel radiation sources for a wide variety of applications. The design parameters for FACET-II are set by the requirements of the plasma wakefield experimental program. To drive the plasma wakefield requires a high peak current, in excess of 10kA. To reach this peak current, the electron and positron design bunch size is 10? by 10? transversely with a bunch length of 10?. This is more than 200 times better than what has been achieved at the existing FACET. The beam energy is 10 GeV, set by the Linac length available and the repetition rate is up to 30 Hz. The FACET-II project is scheduled to be constructed in three major stages. Components of the project discussed in detail include the following: electron injector, bunch compressors and linac, the positron system, the Sector 20 sailboat and W chicanes, and experimental area and infrastructure.

In the FACET plasma-wakefield acceleration experiment a dense 23 GeV electron beam will interact with lithium and cesium plasmas, leading to plasma ion-channel formation. The interaction between the electron beam and the plasma sheath-electrons may lead to a fast growing electron hose instability. By using optics dispersion knobs to induce a controlled z-x tilt along the beam entering the plasma, we investigate the transverse behavior of the beam in the plasma as function of the tilt. We seek to quantify limits on the instability in order to further explore potential limitations on future plasma wakefield accelerators due to the electron hose instability. The FACET plasma-wakefield experiment at SLAC will study beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration. A dense 23 GeV electron beam will interact with lithium or cesium plasma, leading to plasma ion-channel formation. The interaction between the electron beam and the plasma sheath-electrons drives the electron hose instability, as first studied by Whittum. While Ref. [2] indicates the possibility of a large instability growth rate for typical beam and plasma parameters, other studies including have shown that several physical effects may mitigate the hosing growth rate substantially. So far there has been no quantitative benchmarking of experimentally observed hosing in previous experiments. At FACET we aim to perform such benchmarking by for example inducing a controlled z-x tilt along the beamentering the plasma, and observing the transverse behavior of the beam in the plasma as function. The long-term objective of these studies is to quantify potential limitations on future plasma wakefield accelerators due to the electron hose instability.