Assessment of Transverse Instabilities in Proton Driven Hollow Plasma Wakefield Acceleration

TL;DR

This paper investigates the effects of beam-channel misalignment in proton-driven hollow plasma wakefield accelerators using 2D simulations, proposing solutions to mitigate transverse instabilities and preserve beam quality.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of how beam offset and tilt affect wakefield symmetry and introduces methods to correct driver inaccuracies in hollow plasma acceleration.

Findings

Beam-channel offset causes asymmetric transverse wakefields.

Initial driver tilt induces beam quality degradation.

Proposed correction techniques improve beam stability.

Abstract

Hollow plasma has been introduced into the proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerators to overcome the issue of beam quality degradation caused by the nonlinear transverse wakefields varying in radius and time in uniform plasma. It has been demonstrated in simulations that the electrons can be accelerated to energy frontier with well-preserved beam quality in a long hollow plasma channel. However, this scheme imposes tight requirements on the beam-channel alignment. Otherwise asymmetric transverse wakefields along the axis are induced, which could distort the driving bunch and deteriorate the witness beam quality. In this paper, by means of the 2D cartesian particle-in-cell simulations, we examine the potentially detrimental effects induced by the driving beam-channel offset and initial driver tilt, and then propose and assess the solutions to these driver inaccuracy issues.