Simulation design for forthcoming high quality plasma wakefield acceleration experiment in linear regime at SPARC_LAB

TL;DR

This paper presents a simulation framework for optimizing plasma wakefield acceleration experiments at SPARC_LAB, focusing on maintaining beam quality with minimal energy spread and emittance growth over centimeters of acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a parametric simulation approach to optimize beam parameters for high-quality plasma wakefield acceleration in the linear regime, ready for experimental validation.

Findings

Energy spread increase kept below 1% after acceleration

Emittance growth limited to less than 0.02 mm mrad

Energy jitter around 5%

Abstract

In the context of plasma wakefield acceleration beam driven, we exploit a high density charge trailing bunch whose self-fields act by mitigating the energy spread increase via beam loading compensation, together with bunch self-contain operated by the self-consistent transverse field. The work, that will be experimentally tested in the SPARC_LAB test facility, consists of a parametric scan that allows to find optimized parameters in order to preserve the high quality of the trailing bunch over the entire centimeters acceleration length, with a final energy spread increase of 0.1% and an emittance increase of 5 nm. The stability of trailing bunch parameters after acceleration is tested employing a systematic scan of the parameters of the bunches at the injection. The results show that the energy spread increase keeps lower than 1% and the emittance increase is lower than 0.02 mm mrad in all the simulations performed. The energy jitter is of the order of 5%.