Tomographic Visualization of Electron-Beam-Driven Plasma Wakefield Accelerators

等离子体加速是一种利用与等离子体结构(如电子等离子体波)相关的电场来加速带电粒子(如电子)的尖端技术。等离子体结构是使用超短激光脉冲或粒子束创建的。这项技术提供了一种建造比传统加速器技术小得多的高性能粒子加速器的方法。该奖项的目标是可视化由强GeV电子束产生的不断演变的等离子体尾波场加速器结构。通过这项研究开发和改进的单次激发可视化和控制技术可以影响等离子体科学的广泛领域。电子束驱动的尾迹可视化将支持“等离子体加力燃烧”的发展，这是一种使传统直线对撞机能量加倍的新兴技术。这些方法还将促进更可靠的桌面等离子体加速器，这些加速器可用作紧凑型相干X射线源，用于生物、化学和医学研究，用于传统加速器和医疗加速器。最后，这项拟议的研究将培养德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校的一名研究助理、一名博士生和一名本科生，该大学授予拉美裔美国人的本科学位数量在全国排名第四。拟议的奖项将首次提供电子束驱动的等离子体尾迹的直接实验室可视化，并将推进PI开创的可视化快速演变的相对论电子束-等离子体相互作用的新的、独特的方法。他们将补充、基准和验证计算机模拟，以了解电子束驱动的尾迹的物理学，并开发优化和扩展等离子体尾场加速器的策略。

Plasma acceleration is a cutting-edge technique for accelerating charged particles such as electrons using the electric field associated with a plasma structure, such as an electron plasma wave. The plasma structure is created using either ultra-short laser pulses or particle beams. This technique offers a way to build high performance particle accelerators of much smaller size than conventional accelerator techniques. The goal of this award is visualizing evolving plasma wakefield accelerator structures generated by intense GeV electron bunches. The single-shot visualization and control techniques developed and refined through this research can impact a wide cross section of plasma science. The visualization of electron beam driven wakes will support development of "plasma afterburners", an emerging technology for doubling the energy of conventional linear colliders. These methods will also promote more reliable tabletop plasma-based accelerators, which are useful as compact coherent x-ray sources for biological, chemical, and medical research, injectors for conventional accelerators, and medical accelerators. Finally the proposed research will train a research associate, a Ph.D. student, and an undergraduate from UT-San Antonio, which ranks 4th in the nation in number of undergraduate degrees awarded to Hispanics.The proposed award will provide the first direct laboratory visualization of electron-beam driven plasma wakes, and will advance new, unique approaches to visualizing rapidly evolving relativistic electron-beam-plasma interactions that the PI pioneered. They will complement, benchmark and validate computer simulations in understanding the physics of electron-beam driven wakes, and in developing strategies to optimize and scale plasma wakefield accelerators.