Collinear wakefield acceleration has been long established as a method capable of generating ultrahigh acceleration gradients. Because of the success on this front, recently, more efforts have shifted towards developing methods to raise the transformer ratio (TR). This figure of merit is defined as the ratio of the peak acceleration field behind the drive bunch to the peak deceleration field inside the drive bunch. TR is always less than 2 for temporally symmetric drive bunch distributions and therefore recent efforts have focused on generating asymmetric distributions to overcome this limitation. In this Letter, we report on using the emittance-exchange method to generate a shaped drive bunch to experimentally demonstrate a TR≈5 in a dielectric wakefield accelerator.
Plasma wakefields can enable very high accelerating gradients for frontier high energy particle accelerators, in excess of 10 GeV/m. To overcome limits on total acceleration achievable, specially shaped drive beams can be used in both linear and nonlinear plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA), to increase the transformer ratio, implying that the drive beam deceleration is minimized relative to acceleration obtained in the wake. In this Letter, we report the results of a nonlinear PWFA, high transformer ratio experiment using high-charge, longitudinally asymmetric drive beams in a plasma cell. An emittance exchange process is used to generate variable drive current profiles, in conjunction with a long (multiple plasma wavelength) witness beam. The witness beam is energy-modulated by the wakefield, yielding a response that contains detailed spectral information in a single-shot measurement. Using these methods, we generate a variety of beam profiles and characterize the wakefields, directly observing beam-loaded transformer ratios up to R = 7.8. Furthermore, a spectrally-based reconstruction technique, validated by 3D particle-in-cell simulations, is introduced to obtain the drive beam current profile from the decelerating wake data.
We present the first demonstration of high-power, reversed Cherenkov wakefield radiation by electron bunches passing through a metamaterial structure. The structure supports a fundamental TM-like mode with a negative group velocity leading to reversed Cherenkov radiation, which was clearly verified in the experiments. Single 45 nC electron bunches of 65 MeV traversing the structure generated up to 25 MW in 2 ns pulses at 11.4 GHz, in excellent agreement with theory. Two bunches of 85 nC with appropriate temporal spacing generated up to 80 MW by coherent wakefield superposition, the highest RF power that metamaterial structures ever experienced without damage. These results demonstrate the unique features of metamaterial structures that are very attractive for future high-gradient, wakefield accelerators, including two-beam and collinear accelerators. Advantages include the high shunt impedance for high power generation and high gradient acceleration; the simple and rugged structure; and a large parameter space for optimization.
We report on investigations into the fundamental surface emission parameters, the geometric field enhancement factor (β) and the work function (φ), by making both field emission and Schottky-enabled photoemission measurements. The measurements were performed on a copper surface in the Tsinghua University S-band RF gun in two separate experiments. Fitting our data to the models for each experiment indicate that the traditionally assumed high value of β(≈50-500) does not provide a plausible explanation of the data, but incorporating a low value of φ at some sites does. In addition, direct measurements of the surface conducted after the experiment show that β is on the order of a few, consistent with our understanding of the electron emission measurements. Thus we conclude that the dominant source of electron emission in high gradient RF cavities is due to low φ sites, as opposed to the conventionally assumed high β sites. The origin of low φ at these sites is unclear and should be the subject of further investigation.
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