Experimental plasma wake‐field acceleration project

A new experiment on plasma wake‐field acceleration has been designed at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk. An intense modulated driving beam from the electron–positron booster (BEP), a storage ring, will be used to excite a nonlinear plasma wave in a dense plasma (n=1015 cm−3). Important advantages of this beam are its very low emittance (10−8 cm⋅rad in the vertical direction), high energy (850 MeV), and high intensity (1012 particles). A new technique for modulating this beam at a submillimeter wavelength is proposed. A simple numerical code has been developed to simulate the plasma wave excitation with plasma nonlinearity and with three‐dimensional effects taken into account. The code allows the calculation of the radial structure of the nonlinear wake field including the focusing force which was mostly neglected in previous studies but which is especially important for experiment. The present numerical simulations show that, in the proposed experiment, a 1 GeV/m accelerating gradient over a macroscopic distance is attainable.