The Facility for Advanced Accelerator and Experimental Tests (FACET) at SLAC installed a 10-TW Ti : sapphire laser system for pre-ionized plasma wakefield acceleration experiments. High energy (500 mJ), short (50 fs) pulses of 800 nm laser light at 1 Hz are used at the FACET experimental area to produce a plasma column. The laser pulses are stretched to 250 fs before injection into a vapor cell, where the laser is focused by an axicon lens to form a plasma column that can be sustained over the desired radius and length. A 20 GeV electron bunch interacts with this preformed plasma to generate a non-linear wakefield, thus accelerating a trailing witness bunch with gradients on the order of several GV m −1 . The experimental setup and the methods for producing the pre-ionized plasma for plasma wakefield acceleration experiments performed at FACET are described.
It has been estimated that an RF cavity Beam Position Monitor (BPM) could provide a position measurement resolution of less than one nanometer. We have developed a high resolution cavity BPM and associated electronics. A triplet comprised of these BPMs was installed in the extraction line of the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) for testing with its ultra-low emittance beam. The three BPMs were each rigidly mounted inside an alignment frame on six variable-length struts which could be used to move the BPMs in position and angle. We have developed novel methods for extracting the position and tilt information from the BPM signals including a robust calibration algorithm which is immune to beam jitter. To date, we have demonstrated a position resolution of 15.6 nm and a tilt resolution of 2.1 µrad over a dynamic range of approximately ±20 µm.
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