Speaker
Description
Plasma-based acceleration (PBA) offers ultra-high accelerating gradients, but achieving high energy gain and beam quality remains challenging. This work presents the first investigation of PBA driven by heavy ion beams. Benefiting from high kinetic energy and charge density, heavy ions—such as those from the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF)—can excite wakefields up to 6 GV/m. However, the relatively low velocity of heavy ions causes rapid dephasing, severely limiting further energy gain. Conventional linear plasma density scheme fails to resolve this due to a mismatch between the beam radius and plasma skin depth, which degrades the wakefield structure. To mitigate this limit, we propose a novel periodic plasma density modulation scheme. By periodically increasing and decreasing the plasma density, the witness beam is systematically shifted between adjacent accelerating cavities. This technique preserves the robust wakefield structure, significantly extends the effective acceleration length, and accelerates the final electron to 1.34 GeV over a distance of 1.17 m with an energy spread of 1.1%. This method provides a potential route for generating high energy, high intensity electron beams and offers a feasible path for future heavy ion driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiments.
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