Laser-plasma accelerator group

Abstract:

Laser-plasma accelerators are capable of sustaining accelerating fields of 10-100 GeV/m, 100-1000 times that of conventional technology and the highest fields produced by any of the widely researched advanced accelerator concepts. Laser-plasma accelerators also intrinsically accelerate short particle bunches, several orders of magnitude shorter than that of conventional technology, which leads to reductions in beamstrahlung and, hence, savings in the overall power consumption to reach a desired luminosity. These properties make laser-plasma accelerators a promising accelerator technology for a more compact, less expensive high-energy linear collider providing multi-TeV polarized leptons. In this submission to the Snowmass 2021 Accelerator Frontier, we discuss the motivation for a laser-plasma-accelerator-based linear collider, the status of the field, and potential linear collider concepts up to 15 TeV. We outline the research and development path toward a collider based on laser-plasma accelerator technology, and highlight near-term and mid-term applications of this technology on the collider development path. The required experimental facilities to carry out this research are described. We conclude with community recommendations developed during Snowmass.

Abstract:

We investigate the growth of ion density perturbations in large-amplitude linear laser wakefields via two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. Growth rates and wave numbers are found to be consistent with a longitudinal strong-field modulational instability (SFMI). We examine the transverse dependence of the instability for a Gaussian wakefield envelope and show that growth rates and wavenumbers can be maximised off-axis. On-axis growth rates are found to decrease with increasing ion mass or electron temperature. These results are in close agreement with the dispersion relation of a Langmuir wave with energy density that is large compared to the plasma thermal energy density. The implications for wakefield accelerators, in particular multi-pulse schemes, are discussed.