FIRST MEASUREMENTS OF TROJAN HORSE INJECTION IN A PLASMA WAKEFIELD ACCELERATOR

Abstract

Plasma accelerators support accelerating fields of 10-100’s of GV/m over meter-scale distances and routinely produce femtosecond-scale, multi-kA electron bunches. The so called Trojan Horse underdense photocathode plasma wakefield acceleration scheme combines state of-the-art accelerator technology with laser and plasma methods and paves the way to improve beam quality as regards emittance and energy spread by many orders of magnitude. Electron beam brightness levels exceeding 10^20 A m^-2 rad^-2 may be reached, and the tunability allows for multi-GeV energies, designer bunches and energy spreads <0.05% in a single plasma accelerator stage. The talk will present results of the international E210 multiyear experimental program at SLAC FACET, which culminated in successful first demonstration of the Trojan Horse method during FACET’s final experimental run in 2016. Enabling implications for applications, including high performance plasma-based 5th generation light sources such as hard x-ray FEL’s, for which preliminary start-to-end simulations are presented, and for high energy physics are discussed.