RadiaSoft LLC, Boulder, Colorado, USA
Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois, USA
Plasma wakefield accelerators achieve accelerating gradients on the order of the wave-breaking limit, m c2 kp/e, so that higher accelerating gradients correspond to shorter plasma wavelengths. Small-scale accelerating structures, such as plasma and dielectric wakefields, are susceptible to the beam break-up instability (BBU), which can be understood from the Panofsky-Wenzel theorem: if the fundamental accelerating mode scales as b-1 for a structure radius b, then the dipole mode must scale as b-3, meaning that high accelerating gradients necessarily come with strong dipole wake fields. Because of this relationship, any plasma-accelerator-based future collider will require detailed study of the trade-offs between extracting the maximum energy from the driver and mitigating the beam break-up instability. Recent theoretical work* predicts the tradeoff between the witness bunch stability and the amount of energy that can be extracted from the drive bunch, a so-called efficiency-instability relation . We will discuss the beam break-up instability and the efficiency-instability relation and the theoretical assumptions made in reaching this conclusion. We will also present preliminary particle-in-cell simulations of a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator used to test the domain of validity for the assumptions made in this model.
* V. Lebedev, A. Burov, and S. Nagaitsev, "Efficiency versus
instability in plasma accelerators", Phys. Rev. Acc. Beams 20, 121301
(2017).
