Speaker
Description
Electron bunches with attosecond-scale bunch durations and high peak currents would enable new opportunities for next-generation light sources. However, to generate such short bunches requires novel compression techniques. Here we consider plasma-based compression, a method which exploits the inherently large accelerating fields in a plasma wakefield accelerator, to add an energy-time correlation to an electron bunch which exceeds conventional approaches by several orders of magnitude. A downstream dispersive element converts this chirp into temporal compression. Particle-in-cell and particle tracking simulations demonstrate that this technique can enable bunch durations approaching 10 nm and peak currents nearing 1 MA. Practical implementation, however, introduces additional constraints that will impact the compressor performance. Using beam parameters from recent experiments at FACET-II at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, we model plasma-based compression of 10 GeV electron bunches in a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator. We present simulation results showing the achievable compression under realistic conditions and identify the technical challenges that must be addressed for successful compression.
Funding Agency
This work was supported by the U.S. DOE under contract number DE-AC01-76SF00515. C. Emma and K. K. Swanson acknowledge support from the Department of Energy Early Career Research Program.
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