Lindstrøm C A, Beinortaitė J, Björklund Svensson J, Boulton L, Chappell J, Diederichs S, Foster B, Garland J M, González Caminal P, Loisch G, Peña F, Schröder S, Thévenet M, Wesch S, Wing M, Wood J C, D'Arcy R, Osterhoff J
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Hamburg, Germany.
Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Nat Commun. 2024 Jul 19;15(1):6097. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-50320-1.
Radio-frequency particle accelerators are engines of discovery, powering high-energy physics and photon science, but are also large and expensive due to their limited accelerating fields. Plasma-wakefield accelerators (PWFAs) provide orders-of-magnitude stronger fields in the charge-density wave behind a particle bunch travelling in a plasma, promising particle accelerators of greatly reduced size and cost. However, PWFAs can easily degrade the beam quality of the bunches they accelerate. Emittance, which determines how tightly beams can be focused, is a critical beam quality in for instance colliders and free-electron lasers, but is particularly prone to degradation. We demonstrate, for the first time, emittance preservation in a high-gradient and high-efficiency PWFA while simultaneously preserving charge and energy spread. This establishes that PWFAs can accelerate without degradation-an essential step toward energy boosters in photon science and multistage facilities for compact high-energy particle colliders.
射频粒子加速器是探索的引擎，为高能物理和光子科学提供动力，但由于其有限的加速场，它们体积庞大且成本高昂。等离子体尾场加速器（PWFA）在等离子体中传播的粒子束后面的电荷密度波中提供了强几个数量级的场，有望实现尺寸和成本大幅降低的粒子加速器。然而，PWFA很容易降低它们加速的束流的质量。发射度决定了束流能够被聚焦的紧密程度，是对撞机和自由电子激光器等中的关键束流质量，但特别容易退化。我们首次证明了在高梯度和高效率的PWFA中发射度的保持，同时保持电荷和能量展宽。这表明PWFA可以在不降低性能的情况下进行加速——这是迈向光子科学中的能量增强器和紧凑型高能粒子对撞机的多级设施的关键一步。
