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Radio-frequency particle accelerators are engines of discovery, powering high-energy physics and photon science, but are also large and expensive due to their limited accelerating fields. Plasma-wakefield accelerators (PWFAs) provide orders-of-magnitude stronger fields in the charge-density wave behind a particle bunch travelling in a plasma, promising particle accelerators of greatly reduced size and cost. However, PWFAs can easily degrade the beam quality of the bunches they accelerate. Emittance, which determines how tightly beams can be focused, is a critical beam quality in for instance colliders and free-electron lasers, but is particularly prone to degradation. We demonstrate, for the first time, emittance preservation in a high-gradient and high-efficiency PWFA while simultaneously preserving charge and energy spread. This establishes that PWFAs can accelerate without degradation—an essential step toward energy boosters in photon science and multistage facilities for compact high-energy particle colliders. High beam quality is key for particle-accelerator applications in high-energy physics and photon science. Here, authors demonstrate gigavolt-per meter acceleration of electron bunches in a plasma-wakefield accelerator with no degradation of emittance, while also preserving charge and energy spread.

The interaction of intense particle bunches with plasma can give rise to plasma wakes 1 , 2 capable of sustaining gigavolt-per-metre electric fields 3 , 4 , which are orders of magnitude higher than provided by state-of-the-art radio-frequency technology 5 . Plasma wakefields can, therefore, strongly accelerate charged particles and offer the opportunity to reach higher particle energies with smaller and hence more widely available accelerator facilities. However, the luminosity and brilliance demands of high-energy physics and photon science require particle bunches to be accelerated at repetition rates of thousands or even millions per second, which are orders of magnitude higher than demonstrated with plasma-wakefield technology 6 , 7 . Here we investigate the upper limit on repetition rates of beam-driven plasma accelerators by measuring the time it takes for the plasma to recover to its initial state after perturbation by a wakefield. The many-nanosecond-level recovery time measured establishes the in-principle attainability of megahertz rates of acceleration in plasmas. The experimental signatures of the perturbation are well described by simulations of a temporally evolving parabolic ion channel, transferring energy from the collapsing wake to the surrounding media. This result establishes that plasma-wakefield modules could be developed as feasible high-repetition-rate energy boosters at current and future particle-physics and photon-science facilities. Relaxation of a perturbed plasma back to its initial state over nanosecond timescales establishes that megahertz repetition rates are supported, and high luminosities and brilliances are in principle attainable with plasma-wakefield accelerator facilities.

The PolariX TDS (Polarizable X-Band Transverse Deflection Structure) is an innovative TDS-design operating in the X-band frequency-range. The design gives full control of the streaking plane, which can be tuned in order to characterize the projections of the beam distribution onto arbitrary transverse axes. This novel feature opens up new opportunities for detailed characterization of the electron beam. In this paper we present first measurements of the Polarix TDS at the FLASHForward beamline at DESY, including three-dimensional reconstruction of the charge-density distribution of the bunch and slice emittance measurements in both transverse directions. The experimental results open the path toward novel and more extensive beam characterization in the direction of multi-dimensional-beam-phase-space reconstruction.

Plasma-wakefield accelerators driven by intense particle beams promise to significantly reduce the size of future high-energy facilities. Such applications require particle beams with a well-controlled energy spectrum, which necessitates detailed tailoring of the plasma wakefield. Precise measurements of the effective wakefield structure are therefore essential for optimising the acceleration process. Here we propose and demonstrate such a measurement technique that enables femtosecond-level (15 fs) sampling of longitudinal electric fields of order gigavolts-per-meter (0.8 GV m −1 ). This method—based on energy collimation of the incoming bunch—made it possible to investigate the effect of beam and plasma parameters on the beam-loaded longitudinally integrated plasma wakefield, showing good agreement with particle-in-cell simulations. These results open the door to high-quality operation of future plasma accelerators through precise control of the acceleration process. Controlled particle acceleration in plasmas requires precise measurements of the excited wakefield. Here the authors report and demonstrate a high-resolution method to measure the effective longitudinal electric field of a beam-driven plasma-wakefield accelerator.

The FLASHForward experimental facility is a high-performance test-bed for precision plasma wakefield research, aiming to accelerate high-quality electron beams to GeV-levels in a few centimetres of ionized gas. The plasma is created by ionizing gas in a gas cell either by a high-voltage discharge or a high-intensity laser pulse. The electrons to be accelerated will either be injected internally from the plasma background or externally from the FLASH superconducting RF front end. In both cases, the wakefield will be driven by electron beams provided by the FLASH gun and linac modules operating with a 10 Hz macro-pulse structure, generating 1.25 GeV, 1 nC electron bunches at up to 3 MHz micro-pulse repetition rates. At full capacity, this FLASH bunch-train structure corresponds to 30 kW of average power, orders of magnitude higher than drivers available to other state-of-the-art LWFA and PWFA experiments. This high-power functionality means FLASHForward is the only plasma wakefield facility in the world with the immediate capability to develop, explore and benchmark high-average-power plasma wakefield research essential for next-generation facilities. The operational parameters and technical highlights of the experiment are discussed, as well as the scientific goals and high-average-power outlook. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Directions in particle beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration’.

Coherent transition radiation (CTR) in the THz regime is an important diagnostic tool for analyzing the temporal structure of the ultrashort electron bunches needed in ultraviolet and x-ray free-electron lasers. It is also a powerful source of such radiation, covering an exceptionally broad frequency range from about 200 GHz to 100 THz. At the soft x-ray free-electron laser FLASH we have installed a beam transport channel for transition radiation (TR) with the intention to guide a large fraction of the radiation to a laboratory outside the accelerator tunnel. The radiation is produced on a screen inside the ultrahigh vacuum beam pipe of the linac, coupled out through a diamond window and transported to the laboratory through an evacuated tube equipped with five focusing and four plane mirrors. The design of the beamline has been based on a thorough analysis of the generation of TR on metallic screens of limited size. The optical propagation of the radiation has been computed taking into account the effects of near-field (Fresnel) diffraction. The theoretical description of the TR source is presented in the first part of the paper, while the design principles and the technical layout of the beamline are described in the second part. First experimental results demonstrate that the CTR beamline covers the specified frequency range and preserves the narrow time structure of CTR pulses emitted by short electron bunches.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20676-1

Matching to small beta functions is required to preserve emittance in plasma accelerators. The plasma wake provides strong focusing fields, which typically require beta functions on the mm-scale, comparable to those found in the final focusing of a linear collider. Such beams can be time consuming to experimentally produce and diagnose. We present a simple, fast, and noninvasive method to measure Twiss parameters in a linac using two beam position monitors only, relying on the similarity of the beam phase space and the jitter phase space. By benchmarking against conventional quadrupole scans, the viability of this technique was experimentally demonstrated at the FLASHForward plasma-accelerator facility.

The successful operation of x-ray free-electron lasers (FELs), like the Linac Coherent Light Source or the Free-Electron Laser in Hamburg (FLASH), makes unprecedented research on matter at atomic length and ultrafast time scales possible. However, in order to take advantage of these unique light sources and to meet the strict requirements of many experiments in photon science, FEL photon pulse durations need to be known and tunable. This can be achieved by controlling the FEL driving electron beams, and high-resolution longitudinal electron beam diagnostics can be utilized to provide constraints on the expected FEL photon pulse durations. In this paper, we present comparative measurements of soft x-ray pulse durations and electron bunch lengths at FLASH. The soft x-ray pulse durations were measured by FEL radiation pulse energy statistics and compared to electron bunch lengths determined by frequency-domain spectroscopy of coherent transition radiation in the terahertz range and time-domain longitudinal phase space measurements. The experimental results, theoretical considerations, and simulations show that high-resolution longitudinal electron beam diagnostics provide reasonable constraints on the expected FEL photon pulse durations. In addition, we demonstrated the generation of soft x-ray pulses with durations below 50 fs (FWHM) after the implementation of the new uniform electron bunch compression scheme used at FLASH.

Beam-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration based on external injection has the potential to significantly reduce the size of future accelerators. Stability and quality of the acceleration process substantially depends on the incoming bunch parameters. Precise control of the current profile is essential for optimising energy-transfer efficiency and preserving energy spread. At the FLASHForward facility, driver-witness bunch pairs of adjustable bunch length and separation are generated by a set of collimators in a dispersive section, which enables fs-level control of the longitudinal bunch profile. The design of the collimator apparatus and its commissioning is presented.