Numerical investigation of beam-driven PWFA in quasi-nonlinear regime

Abstract

In beam-driven Plasma Based Wakefield Acceleration (PWFA), the quasi-nonlinear model has been designed to combine high efficient ‘blowout’ regimes, where cold and overdense driving electron beams form a totally rarefied plasma channel, with low charge beam distribution assuring the excited wakefield preserves relevant linear properties.This scheme can have applications in experimental facilities, like SPARC 150MeV linac at LNF-INFN laboratories, where low-emittance, low-charge narrow electron beams can be produced to be injected on a preformed plasma channel.Here we present a preliminary numerical investigation of this configuration, using the fully 3D ALaDyn PIC code, as a preparatory work to design optimal conditions for the COMB experimental set-up. Specific numerical tools, having computational and diagnostic advantages in PWFA conditions and checks of the numerical outcomes with analytical results, are also presented and discussed.