LINAC2026 - 33rd Linear Accelerator Conference

Collider-quality electron bunches from an all-optical plasma photoinjector

Not scheduled

2h

Daejeon Convention Center

Poster Presentation MC1.A02 Electron and ion sources, guns, photo injectors, charge breeders poster - not assign

Speaker

Arohi Jain (Stony Brook University)

Description

In recent years, plasma accelerators have advanced significantly toward producing beams suitable for colliders, aiming to replace conventional MV/m RF fields with GV/m fields of nonlinear plasma waves. Realizing a plasma-based collider requires electron bunches with high charge (hundreds of pC), low normalized emittance (~100 nm), and energy spread below 1%. Minimizing energy spread during acceleration involves flattening the accelerating field, which is achievable with a trapezoidal charge distribution. We present a plasma photoinjector concept that enables collider-quality electron bunch generation using two-color ionization injection. The spatiotemporal control over the ionizing laser creates a moving ionization front inside a nonlinear plasma wave, generating an electron bunch with a current profile that flattens the accelerating field. Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of the ionization stage show the formation of an electron bunch with 220 pC charge and low emittance (176x71 nm-rad). Quasistatic PIC simulations of the acceleration stage show that this bunch is efficiently accelerated to 20 GeV over 2-meters with an energy spread below 1% and emittances of 177x82 nm-rad.