Yun Fang

Three regimes of relativistic beam - plasma interaction

Three regimes of relativistic beam - plasma interaction can in principle be reached at the ATF depending on the relative transverse and longitudinal size of the electron bunch when compared to the cold plasma collisionless skin depth c?ωpe: the plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA), the self-modulation instability (SMI), and the current filamentation instability (CFI) regime. In addition, by choosing the bunch density, the linear, quasi-nonlinear and non linear regime of the PWFA can be reached. In the case of the two instabilities, the bunch density determines the growth rate and therefore the occurrence or not of the instability. We briefly describe these three regimes and outline results demonstrating that all these regime have or will be reached experimentally. We also outline planned and possible follow-on experiments.

Numerical study of self modulation instability of 1 nC electron bunch at ATF

The development of self-modulation instability (SMI) is investigated numerically for the 1 nC electron bunch available at Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Possible experiment based on the simulation results is proposed. All the simulations are performed with the 2D-cylindrically symmetric particle-in-cell code.

Self-modulation of ultra-relativistic SLAC electron and positron bunches

Long (L>>λpe) charged particle bunches traveling in dense plasmas are subject to a transverse two-stream instability, the self-modulation instability (SMI)1. This instability modulates the bunch in the radial direction with a longitudinal period approximately equal to the plasma wavelength (λpe~ne1/2). The SMI can be used to transform a long bunch into a train of short bunches that can resonantly drive wakefields to large amplitudes. An experiment known as AWAKE2 was recently approved at CERN to drive GV/m wakefields with 400GeV, ~12cm-long proton bunches in a 10m plasma with λpe~1mm. In the linear wakefield regime, the plasma response is symmetric for positively and negatively charged bunches. However, once the nonlinear regime is approached the plasma response becomes asymmetric, leading to differences that could be evidenced using the ultra-relativistic electron and positron bunches3. This asymmetry makes it more difficult to accelerate positively than negatively charged particle bunches in plasmas.