Speaker
Description
The prospects of PWFA for boosting electron energies via high transformer ratios, as well as the prospects for ultralow-emittance beam production using plasma photocathodes [1], are widely discussed. Contrary to the traditional experience of accelerator scientists, we anticipate that the production of ultrabright beams exceeding the current state of the art by orders of magnitude via these mechanisms is not associated with increased challenges regarding tolerances and jitter. Instead, such beams may enable the opposite: relaxed demands on the quality, precision, reproducibility and stability of incoming beams [2].
This counterintuitive feature – with potentially extremely high impact for feasibility of plasma photocathodes and their applications – will be discussed in this contribution. An example is insensitivity towards timing jitter: contrary to concerns, timing fluctuations of several tens of femtoseconds of the plasma photocathode laser with respect to the plasma wave do not lead to large variations of the produced electron witness beam, but instead to virtually identical witness beams and corresponding simulated FEL performance, which we show in extension of [3].
[1] Habib, Heinemann et al., Plasma Photocathodes, Annalen der Physik, September 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.202200655
[2] Campbell et al.,Phys. Rev. Research 8, 013273 (2026)
[3] Berman et al., https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.0640
| Working group | WG3 |
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