The Integrable Optics Test Accelerator (IOTA) is a storage ring for advanced beam physics research currently being built and commissioned at Fermilab. It will operate with protons and electrons using injectors with momenta of 70 and 150 MeV/c, respectively. The research program includes the study of nonlinear focusing integrable optical beam lattices based on special magnets and electron lenses, beam dynamics of space-charge effects and their compensation, optical stochastic cooling, and several other experiments. In this article, we present the design and main parameters of the facility, outline progress to date and provide the timeline of the construction, commissioning and research. The physical principles, design, and hardware implementation plans for the major IOTA experiments are also discussed.

The Astra simulation code has been successfully used in the design of linac and rf photoinjector systems utilizing beams with azimuthal symmetry. We present recently implemented changes to Astra that allow tracking of beams in beamlines without the assumption of any symmetry. The changes especially include a 3D mesh space charge algorithm and the possibility to import 3D electromagnetic field maps from eigensolver programs.

Linear-field particle acceleration in free space (which is distinct from geometries like the linac that requires components in the vicinity of the particle) has been studied for over 20 years, and its ability to eventually produce high-quality, high energy multi-particle bunches has remained a subject of great interest. Arguments can certainly be made that linear-field particle acceleration in free space is very doubtful given that first-order electron-photon interactions are forbidden in free space. Nevertheless, we chose to develop an accurate and truly predictive theoretical formalism to explore this remote possibility when intense, few-cycle electromagnetic pulses are used in a computational experiment. The formalism includes exact treatment of Maxwell’s equations and exact treatment of the interaction among the multiple individual particles at near and far field. Several surprising results emerge. We find that electrons interacting with intense laser pulses in free space are capable of gaining substantial amounts of energy that scale linearly with the field amplitude. For example, 30 keV electrons (2.5% energy spread) are accelerated to 61 MeV (0.5% spread) and to 205 MeV (0.25% spread) using 250 mJ and 2.5 J lasers respectively. These findings carry important implications for our understanding of ultrafast electron-photon interactions in strong fields.

Flat beams -beams with asymmetric transverse emittances -have important applications in novel light-source concepts, advanced-acceleration schemes and could possibly alleviate the need for damping rings in lepton colliders. Over the last decade, a flat-beam-generation technique based on the conversion of an angular-momentum-dominated beam was proposed and experimentally tested. In this paper we explore the production of compressed flat beams. We especially investigate and optimize the flat-beam transformation for beams with substantial fractional energy spread. We use as a simulation example the photoinjector of the Fermilab's Advanced Superconducting Test Accelerator (ASTA). The optimizations of the flat beam generation and compression at ASTA were done via start-to-end numerical simulations for bunch charges of 3.2 nC, 1.0 nC and 20 pC at~37 MeV. The optimized emittances of flat beams with different bunch charges were found to be 0.25 μm (emittance ratio is~400), 0.13 μm, 15 nm before compression, and 0.41 μm, 0.20 μm, 16 nm after full compression, respectively with peak currents as high as 5.5 kA for a 3.2-nC flat beam. These parameters are consistent with requirements needed to excite wakefields in asymmetric dielectric-lined waveguides or produce significant photon flux using small-gap micro-undulators.