Speaker
Description
High accelerating gradients make plasma wakefield accelerators an attractive candidate for future teraelectronvolt (TeV) machines, but conventional staging concepts accelerate a single witness bunch through many independent stages, and maintaining its quality across every interface imposes stringent tolerances on alignment, timing, and matching. In this talk, we propose an alternative architecture—plasma acceleration through regenerative cascading (PARC)—in which the witness accelerated in one stage serves as the driver for the next, while a new witness is freshly self-injected within each stage. Two consequences follow: stage energy gains compound multiplicatively instead of additively, and the staging tolerances are eliminated because each self-injected witness is automatically aligned, synchronized, and potentially matched to the wake. Start-to-end particle-in-cell simulations show that a 45 GeV, 100 nC driver yields a ~1.1 TeV, 0.12 nC beam with 0.3% rms energy spread and 4 mm-mrad normalized emittance in just two stages totaling less than a kilometer of plasma. PARC shifts the difficulty of TeV plasma acceleration away from staging and onto driver generation, where several viable technologies are already under development.
Acknowledgements. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Grant No. DE-SC0010064, as well as by the University of California, Los Angeles. Simulations used resources of NERSC under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 (Award HEP-ERCAP-MP113).
| Working group | WG3 |
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