Plasma channels represent a well-suited environment for laser-based particle acceleration. The reasons for this are twofold. On one hand, the laser can be self-guided within the channel, which allows for long propagation distances. On the other hand, the channel can affect the particles directly. For example, self-generated electromagnetic fields can assist direct laser acceleration within the...
Target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA) of ions from laser-irradiated solid foils is a well-known, robust and widely used method. Numerical simulation of this process using PIC codes is, however, very challenging. Indeed, very small space and time steps are required to resolve the plasma skin depth and plasma period at the solid densities considered, while large spatiotemporal domains are...
In plasma wakefield accelerators, intense laser or particle beams drive strong Langmuir waves with the energy density as high as the rest energy of plasma electrons. A large fraction of this energy remains in the plasma after passage of the accelerated beam and causes rapid expansion of the plasma column boundary. The energy initially stored in coherent electron oscillations first transforms...
Three dimensional Particle in Cell simulations of Laser Wakefield Acceleration require a considerable amount of resources but are necessary to have realistic predictions and to design future experiments. The planned experiments for the CILEX facility also include two stages of plasma acceleration, for a total plasma length of the order of centimiters. In this context, where traditional 3D...
Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations play a major role to the development of laser-wakefield acceleration (LWFA). Although PIC simulations provide quantitative predictions, that can be directly compared with experimental results, they are also very computationally intensive. Full scale 3d PIC simulations of LWFA are challenging due to the large-scale disparity between the laser wavelength...
Radiation processes in plasmas are extremely relevant for a number of fields, ranging from astrophysics to small scale microscopy. These processes are usually associated with the motion of a large number of electrons, under the action of intense electric and magnetic self-consistent fields and require numerical descriptions in order to be explored. Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes like OSIRIS are...
Laser plasma wakefield acceleration is a promising development path for acceleration technologies. Studying this phenomenon relies heavily on numerical simulations. Generic PIC simulations provide the most detailed description of laser-plasma interaction, but they are computationally demanding. Simplyfing the model, e.g., with quasistatic approximation, yields significant performance gains at...
Acceleration of the ultrathin plasma foils by the laser radiation pressure promises a compact alternative of conventional accelerator delivering energetic ions. It was shown, that a major showstopper of this scheme is a strong transverse instability, which develops the surface ripples often attributed to the Rayleigh-Taylor-like (RT) mechanism triggered by the laser pressure. However,...
Utilizing laser-wakefield accelerated (LWFA) electrons to drive a
plasma-wakefield accelerator (PWFA) holds great promise for realizing
centimeter-scale electron accelerators providing ultra-high brightness
beams. Recent experiments at HZDR could demonstrate for the first time
such an electron acceleration in a nonlinear PWFA plasma wakefield. For
driving this compact hybrid accelerator setup,...
The "Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment" (AWAKE) aims to enable lepton acceleration via proton-driven wakefields. It comprises extensive numerical studies as well as experiments at the CERN laboratory.
The baseline scenario has a simulation domain of 0.81 cm in the x, 0.42 cm in the y, and 10 m in the z direction. The smallest scale in this domain is the plasma...
Proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration has been demonstrated in simulations to be capable of accelerating electrons to the energy frontier in a single plasma stage. However, the achieved beam quality especially the normalized emittance is still far from applications. This is because the transverse plasma wakefield acting on the witness electron bunch is nonlinear to the radius, and it...
Hollow plasma has been introduced into the proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerator to overcome the issue of beam quality degradation caused by the nonlinear transverse wakefields varying in radius and in time in uniform plasma. It has been demonstrated that the electrons can be accelerated to the energy frontier with a well-preserved beam quality in a long hollow plasma channel. However,...
Characterizing the plasma density profile in a plasma accelerator is important for predicting the beam dynamics and the electric field gradients produced in the plasma wake structure. In this poster, we present a two fluid model for the time evolution of the plasma and neutral gas density profiles for a laser ionized plasma filament. Our model includes the effects of hydrodynamic expansion and...
