Speaker
Description
Collective fields of the plasma provide focusing gradients far exceeding those of conventional quadrupoles, motivating the use of plasma lenses for strong beam focusing. Such strong focusing commonly arises in the blowout regime behind a driver, where the resulting ion channel functions as a natural plasma lens. Yet the natural cylindrical symmetry of such a structure introduces transverse coupling of the focusing forces along the ion channel, making it difficult to preserve flat-beam phase space for the highly asymmetric beams. We demonstrate a new class of plasma lens that overcomes this limitation by exploiting a previously unobserved focusing-dominated wakefield regime at low plasma density. Using a LWIR laser, we generate a highly elongated, electron-depleted ion cavity whose transverse focusing fields remain strong and linear, while the accelerating fields are nearly extinguished. The resulting wake is a cylindrical ion channel that focuses only in one transverse direction, a true one-dimensional (1D) plasma lens. In this talk, we present the experimental results from the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) leveraging the NCRF linac and CO2 LWIR laser.
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