Speaker
Description
Plasma wakefield acceleration offers high field gradients, typically on the order of 10 to 100x larger than conventional RF cavities. Currently available proton beams have sufficient energy to maintain these wakefields over significant distances, allowing a witness bunch of leptons to be accelerated to the energy frontier, with the plasma acting to mediate energy transfer from the proton driver to a lepton witness. The ALiVE project is pursuing the use of a sub-millimetre proton drive beam [1,2], which offers the possibility to significantly increase the the beam—beam energy-transfer efficiency compared to the longer beams currently available, opening the path to collider applications. In this work, we present the first full plasma simulations of the ALiVE scheme, demonstrating the acceleration of an electron bunch from injection to the energy frontier while including nonlinear effects such as ion motion and ionization. We further discuss the challenges these nonlinear effects represent in extending acceleration towards higher energy, as well as progress on the plasma source, proton accelerator complex, and positron acceleration scheme.
Footnotes
- J. Farmer et al., New J. Phys. 26, 113011 (2024)
** A. Caldwell et al., “Proton-Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration for Future HEP Colliders”, input to the European Strategy for Particle Physics Update (2025)
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