EuPRAXIA Seminar: AWAKE - Plasma wakefield acceleration for application to particle physics
The next seminar in the EuPRAXIA Virtual Seminar Series will take place on Friday 30th October at 11am UK time. Patric Muggli, Leader of the Future Accelerators Group/AWAKE at the Max Planck Institute for Physics, will present his seminar ‘AWAKE: Plasma wakefield acceleration for application to particle physics’.
About the talk
AWAKE explores the possibility of using high-energy proton bunches to drive wakefields and accelerate electrons to high energies (>100 GeV) in a single plasma, therefore avoiding the intricacies of staging multiple plasmas. The experiment uses the 400 GeV proton bunch from the CERN SPS. These bunches are long (~170 ps), and their density must first be modulated for the wakefields to reach GV/m amplitudes.
The seminar will introduce the AWAKE experiment and show that the self-modulation (SM) instability [2] can be seeded [3] and made reproducible in phase and amplitude, a necessary condition for deterministic external injection and acceleration of a witness bunch. Energy gain by test electrons side-injected into the self-modulator plasma exceeds 2 GeV [4]. The accelerating gradient increases when a step in density is imposed on the plasma.
The talk will cover observations of the growth and saturation of the SM process, the effects of density gradients [5] and ion motion on its development [6], as well as the development of the hosing [7] and filamentation [8] instabilities.
The seminar will also outline plans for future experiments using two plasmas, one for self-modulation and one for acceleration. These experiments aim to demonstrate that, with on-axis external injection, the parameters of the accelerated bunch can be controlled by loading the wakefields, and that the energy gain can be scaled with plasma length using the plasma sources currently being developed. Possible applications of the AWAKE acceleration scheme will also be discussed.
References
[1] E. Gschwendtner et al., Symmetry 14, 1680 (2022).
[2] AWAKE Collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 054802 (2019); C. A. Lindstrøm et al./T. Turner et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 054801 (2019).
[3] Batsch et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 164802 (2021); Verra et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 024802 (2022).
[4] AWAKE Collaboration, Nature 561, 363 (2018).
[5] Braunmueller et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 264801 (2020).
[6] Turner et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 155001 (2024).
[7] Nechaeva et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 075001 (2024).
[8] Verra et al., Phys. Rev. E 109, 055203 (2024).
About the speaker
Patric Muggli is the leader of the Future Accelerators Group/AWAKE at the Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) in Garching/Munich, Germany. He is also Chair of the Physics and Experiment Board, spokesperson for the AWAKE Collaboration, and a member of the Management and Technical Boards.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the IEEE, and chairs the panel on Advanced and Novel Accelerators within the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). He received the 2011 Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award and the 2026 Advanced Accelerator Concept (AAC) Prize.
You can sign up for the seminar series here.
We hope to see you online on 30th October!
Comments