Overview of Plasma Lens Experiments and Recent Results at SPARC_LAB

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent experiments on plasma lenses at SPARC_LAB, highlighting their potential as compact, high-gradient focusing devices for electron beams in plasma accelerators.

Contribution

It provides an overview of recent plasma lens experiments and discusses future perspectives, emphasizing their role in high-quality beam transport.

Findings

Plasma lenses achieve focusing gradients of the order of kT/m.

They offer radially symmetric focusing as a promising alternative to permanent magnets.

Recent experiments demonstrate the feasibility of plasma lenses for beam manipulation.

Abstract

Beam injection and extraction from a plasma module is still one of the crucial aspects to solve in order to produce high quality electron beams with a plasma accelerator. Proper matching conditions require to focus the incoming high brightness beam down to few microns size and to capture a high divergent beam at the exit without loss of beam quality. Plasma-based lenses have proven to provide focusing gradients of the order of kT/m with radially symmetric focusing thus promising compact and affordable alternative to permanent magnets in the design of transport lines. In this paper an overview of recent experiments and future perspectives of plasma lenses is reported.