The SPARTA project: toward a demonstrator facility for multistage plasma acceleration

TL;DR

The SPARTA project aims to develop a multistage plasma accelerator demonstrator to address key challenges in beam staging and stability, enabling applications like strong-field quantum electrodynamics.

Contribution

It introduces solutions for plasma beam staging and stabilization, and provides a conceptual design for a multistage plasma accelerator facility.

Findings

Development of a nonlinear plasma lens for staging

Implementation of self-stabilization mechanisms

Design of a medium-scale multistage plasma accelerator

Abstract

Plasma accelerators promise greatly reduced size and cost for future particle-accelerator facilities. However, several challenges remain to be solved; in particular that of coupling beams between plasma stages (i.e., staging) without beam-quality degradation, and that of ensuring a stable acceleration process. In order to mature the technology, it is also key to identify an application that requires staging and high stability but is not overly challenging in other parameters such as energy efficiency, beam quality and repetition rate. The goal of the ERC-funded project SPARTA is to solve the staging and stability problems of plasma acceleration, and to combine the solutions into a medium-scale multistage plasma-accelerator facility for such an application: experiments in strong-field quantum electrodynamics. Here, we discuss the three main objectives of the SPARTA project: developing a nonlinear plasma lens for staging, developing self-stabilization mechanisms, and providing a conceptual design for a multistage demonstrator facility.