An overview is given of the physics issues relevant to the plasma wakefield accelerator, the plasma beat-wave accelerator, the laser wakefield accelerator, including the self-modulated regime, and wakefield accelerators driven by multiple electron or laser pulses. Basic properties of linear and nonlinear plasma waves are discussed, as well as the trapping and acceleration of electrons in the plasma wave. Formulas are presented for the accelerating field and the energy gain in the various accelerator configurations. The propagation of the drive electron or laser beams is discussed, including limitations imposed by key instabilities and methods for optically guiding laser pulses. Recent experimental results are summarized.

Overview of plasma-based accelerator concepts

This self-contained, comprehensive book describes the fundamental properties of soft x-rays and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation and discusses their applications in a wide variety of fields, including EUV lithography for semiconductor chip manufacture and soft x-ray biomicroscopy. The author begins by presenting the relevant basic principles such as radiation and scattering, wave propagation, diffraction, and coherence. He then goes on to examine a broad range of phenomena and applications. The topics covered include EUV lithography, biomicroscopy, spectromicroscopy, EUV astronomy, synchrotron radiation, and soft x-ray lasers. He also provides a great deal of useful reference material such as electron binding energies, characteristic emission lines and photo-absorption cross-sections. The book will be of great interest to graduate students and researchers in engineering, physics, chemistry, and the life sciences. It will also appeal to practicing engineers involved in semiconductor fabrication and materials science.

X-Rays and Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation: Principles and Applications

In this review we propose to address the question: for the life-science researcher, what does X-ray microscopy have to offer that is not otherwise easily available?We will see that the answer depends on a combination of resolution, penetrating power, analytical sensitivity, compatibility with wet specimens, and the ease of image interpretation.

Soft X-ray microscopes and their biological applications

To develop plasma wakefield acceleration into a compact and affordable replacement for conventional accelerators, beams of charged particles must be accelerated at high efficiency in a high electric field; here this is demonstrated for a bunch of charged electrons ‘surfing’ on a previously excited plasma wave. Particle colliders that operate at the high-energy frontier using electric fields generated by radio waves are approaching the limits of feasibility in terms of size and cost, but there are other acceleration techniques that could make less expensive and more compact devices. The plasma wakefield accelerator, in which an electron bunch is accelerated by making it 'surf' on a plasma wave excited by another electron bunch, promises an energy gain in the gigaelectron-volt regime over just a few centimetres — an energy gain that requires hundreds of metres using traditional accelerators. Previously, this technique had only been used to accelerate a very small number of electrons at a time. Now, researchers working at FACET, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, USA, have achieved acceleration of about half a billion electrons at once with an unprecedented efficiency for a plasma accelerator. This achievement could be a milestone in the development of affordable and compact accelerators for applications ranging from high energy physics to medical and industrial applications. High-efficiency acceleration of charged particle beams at high gradients of energy gain per unit length is necessary to achieve an affordable and compact high-energy collider. The plasma wakefield accelerator is one concept1,2,3 being developed for this purpose. In plasma wakefield acceleration, a charge-density wake with high accelerating fields is driven by the passage of an ultra-relativistic bunch of charged particles (the drive bunch) through a plasma4,5,6. If a second bunch of relativistic electrons (the trailing bunch) with sufficient charge follows in the wake of the drive bunch at an appropriate distance, it can be efficiently accelerated to high energy. Previous experiments using just a single 42-gigaelectronvolt drive bunch have accelerated electrons with a continuous energy spectrum and a maximum energy of up to 85 gigaelectronvolts from the tail of the same bunch in less than a metre of plasma7. However, the total charge of these accelerated electrons was insufficient to extract a substantial amount of energy from the wake. Here we report high-efficiency acceleration of a discrete trailing bunch of electrons that contains sufficient charge to extract a substantial amount of energy from the high-gradient, nonlinear plasma wakefield accelerator. Specifically, we show the acceleration of about 74 picocoulombs of charge contained in the core of the trailing bunch in an accelerating gradient of about 4.4 gigavolts per metre. These core particles gain about 1.6 gigaelectronvolts of energy per particle, with a final energy spread as low as 0.7 per cent (2.0 per cent on average), and an energy-transfer efficiency from the wake to the bunch that can exceed 30 per cent (17.7 per cent on average). This acceleration of a distinct bunch of electrons containing a substantial charge and having a small energy spread with both a high accelerating gradient and a high energy-transfer efficiency represents a milestone in the development of plasma wakefield acceleration into a compact and affordable accelerator technology.

High-efficiency acceleration of an electron beam in a plasma wakefield accelerator

High‐energy accelerators have been physicists’ main tools for exploring the building blocks of matter for more than 60 years. During this time the particle energy has increased exponentially as a result of a combination of improvements in existing machines and the invention of new acceleration techniques. Historically, whenever a given type of accelerator has reached the limit of its performance, an innovative idea for particle manipulation, storage, cooling or acceleration has made possible experiments at ever higher energies. The tremendous increase in the energy of accelerators has not, however, been without an increase in capital costs. The cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider makes timely an examination of possible alternative concepts for investigating some of the same physics.

Advanced accelerator concepts

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A plasma wake field accelerator

Many of the important properties of the stored beam in an electron storage ring are determined by integrals, ’ taken around the whole ring, of various characteristic functions of the guide fielci. Some of the integrals are handled easily, but a few are usually estimated graphically - particularly for alternating-gradient guide fields. This report describes a convenient method for evaluating numerically these recalcitrant integrals. In the usual linear approximation, the integrals we wish to consider are most conveniently expressed in terms of four (somewhat redundant) functions of the azimuthal coordinates: p(s) the radius of curvature of the design orbit, n the field index, F(s) the radial betatro; function andT(s) the off-energy (or “dispersion”) function. The Integrals We restrict our attention to guide fields made up of a number of magnetic segments - magnets or straight sections The functions p and n are assumed to have constant values within a given magnet, but vary abruptly at the entrance and erit boundaries. The integrals of interest are given by:

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Evaluation of Synchrotron Radiation Integrals

Recent technological developments have opened the possibility to construct a device which we call a linac coherent light source (LCLS) (C. Pellegrini et al., Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 331 (1993) 223; H. Winick et al., Proc. IEEE 1993 Particle Accelerator Conf., Washington, DC, May 1993; C. Pellegrini, Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 341 (1994) 326; J. Seeman, SPIE Meet. on Electron Beam Sources of High Brightness Radiation, San Diego, CA, July 1993 [1–4]); it would be a fourth-generation light source, with brightness, coherence, and peak power far exceeding other sources. Operating on the principle of the free electron laser (FEL), the LCLS would extend the range of FEL operation to much shorter wavelength than the 240 nm that has so far been reached. We report the results of studies of the use of the SLAC linac to drive an LCLS at wavelengths from about 3 to 100 nm initially and possibly even shorter wavelengths in the future. Lasing would be achieved in a single pass of a low emittance, high peak current, high-energy electron beam through a long undulator. Most present FELs use an optical cavity to build up the intensity of the light to achieve lasing action in a low-gain oscillator configuration. By eliminating the optical cavity, which is difficult to make at short wavelengths, laser action can be extended to shorter wavelengths by self-amplified-spontaneous-emission (SASE), or by harmonic generation from a longer wavelength seed laser. Short wavelength, single pass lasers have been extensively studied at several laboratories and at recent workshops (M. Cornacchia and H. Winick (eds.), SLAC Report 92/02; I. Ben-Zvi and H. Winick (eds.), BNL report 49651 [5,6]). The required low-emittance electron beam can be achieved with recently-developed rf photocathode electron guns (B.E. Carlsten, Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 285 (1989) 313; J. Rosenzweig and L. Serafini, Proc. IEEE 1993 Particle Accelerator Conf., Washington, DC, 1993 [7,8]). The peak current is increased by about an order of magnitude by compressing the bunch to a lenght of about 0.2 ps (rms). Techniques for beam transport, acceleration, and compression without emittance dilution have been developed at SLAC as part of the linear-collider project (J. Seeman, Advances of Accelerator Physics and Technologies, ed. H. Schopper (World Scientific, Singapore, 1993 [9]). The undulator length required to saturate the laser varies from about 15 m for a 100 nm FEL to about 60 m at 3 nm. Initial experiments, at wavelengths down to about 50 nm are planned using the 25-m long Paladin undulator now located at LLNL. In a proposed future LCLS R&D facility the short wavelength light pulses are distributed to multiple end stations using grazing-incidence mirrors. About 10 14 photons per pulse can be produced at a 120 Hz rate, corresponding to average brightness levels of about 10 21 photons/s/mm 2 /mrad 2 within 0.1% BW and peak brightness levels of about 10 31 photons/s/mm 2 /mrad 2 within 0.1% BW. Peak power levels are several hundred megawatts to several gigawatts. Electron energies required range from about 500 MeV for the 100 nm FEL to about 7 GeV for 3 nm.

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Short wavelength FELs using the SLAC linac

We report the results of preliminary studies of a 2 to 4 nm SASE FEL, using a photoinjector to produce the electron beam, and the SLAC linac to accelerate it to an energy up to 10 GeV. Longitudinal bunch compression is used to increase ten fold the peak current to 2.5 kA, while reducing the bunch length to the subpicosecond range. The saturated output power is in the multi-gigawatt range, producing about 1014 coherent photons within a bandwidth of about 0.2% rms, in a pulse of several millijoules. At 120 Hz repetition rate the average power is about 1 W. The system is optimized for X-ray microscopy in the water window around 2 to 4 nm, and will permit imaging a biological sample in a single subpicosecond pulse.

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A 2 to 4 nm high power FEL on the SLAC linac

As the size of storage rings proposed and under construction increases, the chromaticity reaches values which require correction schemes with a new order of sophistication involving sextupoles. The very large chromaticities encountered in storage rings like PEP, PETRA and the ''Very Big Storage Rings'' produce a new set of undesirable characteristics in the beam dynamics which require a more complicated means of correction. The method of attack used at PEP to solve the problem of both satisfactory chromaticity correction and stable non-linear motion is discussed. The analytic expressions developed for calculating the dispersion function through second order in delta and for the tune shifts through third order in delta, agree well with the results of the matrix multiplication method over the range in delta of interest. Analytic expressions for the tune shift with betatron amplitude agree well with the results from the tracking programs and can be used to determine for which amplitudes the tune will be shifted to a resonance.

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P. Morton

Papers

A plasma wake field accelerator

Evaluation of Synchrotron Radiation Integrals

Short wavelength FELs using the SLAC linac

A 2 to 4 nm high power FEL on the SLAC linac

Chromaticity Correction in Large Storage Rings