Short-range Wakefields Research Articles

Manipulation and Wakefield Effects on Multi-Pulse Driver Beams in PWFA Injector Stages

Particle-driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) exploits the intense wakefields excited in a plasma by a high-brightness driver beam in order to accelerate a trailing, properly delayed witness electron beam. Such a configuration offers notable advantages in achieving very large accelerating gradients that are suitable for applications in particle colliders and photon production. Moreover, the amplitude of the accelerating fields can be enhanced by resonantly exciting the plasma using a multi-pulse driver beam with a proper time structure. Before the injection into the plasma stage, the pulsed electron beam, conventionally termed the comb beam, is usually produced and pre-accelerated in a radio-frequency (RF) linear accelerator (linac). In this pape, we discuss challenging aspects of the dynamics that comb beams encounter in the RF injector stage preceding the plasma. In particular, the examples we analyze focus on the use of velocity bunching to manipulate the time structure of the beam and the impact of dipole short-range wakefields on the transverse emittances. Indeed, both processes crucially affect the phase space distribution and its quality, which are determinant features for an efficient acceleration in the plasma. In addition, the analyses we present are performed with the custom tracking code MILES, which utilizes semi-analytical models for a simplified evaluation of wakefield effects in the presence of space charge forces.

Short-range wakefields in an L-shaped corrugated structure

Short-range wakefields in an L-shaped corrugated structure

Beam based characterization of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility Extremely Brilliant Source short range wakefield model

Beam based characterization of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility Extremely Brilliant Source short range wakefield model

Equilibrium of an arbitrary bunch train with cavity resonators and short range wake: Enhanced iterative solution with Anderson acceleration

This paper continues the work of two previous treatments of bunch lengthening by a passive harmonic cavity in an electron storage ring. Such cavities, intended to reduce the effect of Touschek scattering, are a feature of fourth generation synchrotron light sources. The charge densities in the equilibrium state are given by solutions of coupled Ha\"issinski equations, which are nonlinear integral equations. If the only wake fields are from cavity resonators, the unknowns can be the Fourier transforms of bunch densities at the resonator frequencies. The solution scheme based on this choice of unknowns proved to be deficient at the design current when multiple resonators were included. Here we return to the conventional formulation of Ha\"issinski equations in coordinate space, the unknowns being charge densities at mesh points on a fine grid. This system would be awkward to solve by the Newton method used previously, because the Jacobian matrix is very large. Here a new solution is described, which is both Jacobian-free and much simpler. It is based on an elementary fixed point iteration, accelerated by Anderson's method. The scheme is notably fast and robust, accommodating even the case of extreme over-stretching at current far beyond the design value. The Anderson method is promising for many problems in accelerator theory and beyond, since it is quite simple and can be used to attack all kinds of nonlinear and linear integral and differential equations. Results are presented for ALS-U, with updated design parameters. The model includes harmonic and main r.f. cavities, compensation of beam loading of the main cavity by adjustment of the generator voltage, and a realistic short range wake field (rather than the broad-band resonator wake invoked previously).

Combined effect of chromaticity and feedback on transverse head-tail instability

The resonant interaction of a bunched particle beam with short-range wakefields is the cause of head-tail instability, which is a major limitation for single-bunch beam intensity in circular accelerators. There are several processes that suppress this type of instability, such as fast chromatic damping and Landau damping due to machine nonlinearity. Beam-based feedback systems (transverse dampers) provide active suppression of the beam oscillations. The combined effect of the transverse dampers and chromaticity is discussed in this article. A brief overview of theoretical and experimental studies of the head-tail instability and its mitigation is presented. Results of experimental studies of the transverse mode coupling carried out at National Synchrotron Light Source-II are compared with the theoretical model.

Numerical solution of the coupled Haïssinski equations for the equilibrium state of an arbitrary bunch train in an electron storage ring

We study the effects of the beam loadings in the main and harmonic cavities and short-range wakefields on the bunch lengthening performance, in an electron storage ring. The compensation of the main cavity beam loading is modeled by adjusting the RF generator voltage so that the total voltage from the main cavity for each bunch can get as close as possible to the desired effective accelerating voltage under the ideal main cavity assumption. A system of coupled Haïssinski equations, which determine the bunch positions and profiles in the equilibrium state for arbitrary beam-fill patterns, are derived and solved numerically by a relaxation iteration. The proposed method has advantages of being a simple algorithm, displaying effectiveness as well as good convergence. The parameters of the planned Advanced Light Source upgrade (ALS-U) storage ring are used to test the method and good agreement is obtained comparing with particle tracking simulations.

Longitudinal equilibrium density distribution of arbitrary filled bunches in presence of a passive harmonic cavity and the short range wakefield

We propose a novel scheme for the calculation of bunch profiles and synchronous phase shifts for arbitrary fill patterns in electron storage rings considering both the effects of the passive harmonic cavity and the short range wakefield. This scheme treats the bunch as a charge distribution rather than a point charge with a bunch form factor, and divides the voltage induced in the cavity into two groups: that induced by the previous passages and that by the present passage, where the latter is integrated with the short range wakefield from all the other vacuum components. An iteration loop for computing the bunch profiles, including a subloop using Newton iteration for calculating the synchronous phase deviations, is built and implemented into a matlab-based code. Using this code, we study the bunch lengthening and centroid transient effects for several possible fill patterns in the Hefei Advanced Light Facility storage ring under design. We find the method is very efficient, and the CPU time for the whole calculation on a regular personal computer is less than 30 seconds for each case even with more than 700 bunches. Using the case of a long gap fill as a benchmark example, both the results given by our code and the multiparticle tracking simulation with elegant are in very good agreement.

Submicropulse electron-beam dynamics correlated with short-range wakefields in Tesla-type superconducting rf cavities

We report direct observations of submicropulse beam centroid shifts (head-tail kicks) correlated with short-range wakefields generated by off-axis electron-beam steering in Tesla-type superconducting rf cavities. The experiments were performed at the Fermilab Accelerator Science and Technology (FAST) Facility using its unique configuration of a photocathode rf gun injecting beam into two separated nine-cell cavities. The cavities are in series with corrector magnets and beam position monitors (BPMs) located before, between, and after them. The off-axis steering in the cavity was guided by the rf BPM data and higher-order mode circuitry targeting the first and second dipole passbands. The centroid shifts of up to 300 μm from head to tail of the ∼10-ps-long micropulses at 500 pC/b in a 3-MHz pulse train were measured via optical transition radiation at a downstream screen with a Hamamatsu C5680 synchroscan streak camera. We also showed that we could compensate such kicks from the first cavity with the short-range wakefields (SRWs) in the second cavity, and we observed the dilution of the beam size in the tail of the pulses. A simple numerical model of the SRW effect in a single Tesla cavity is compared to the experiment successfully. In principle, these fundamental results may be scaled to cryomodule configurations of major free-electron laser (FEL) facilities such as the European XFEL, Linac Coherent Light Source or LCLS-II XFEL, and the conceptual international linear collider.

Novel fast simulation technique for axisymmetric plasma wakefield acceleration configurations in the blowout regime

In the blowout regime of plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA), which is the most relevant configuration for current and future applications and experiments, the plasma flow that is excited by the ultra-relativistic drive beam is highly nonlinear. Thus, fast and accurate simulations codes are indispensable tools in the study of this extremely important problem. We have developed a novel algorithm that deals with the propagation of axisymmetric bunches of otherwise arbitrary profile through a cold plasma of uniform density. In contrast to the existing PWFA simulation tools, our code PLEBS (PLasma-Electron Beam Simulations) uses a new computational scheme which ensures that the transverse and longitudinal directions are completely decoupled---a feature which significantly enhances the speed and robustness of the new method. Our numerical results are benchmarked against the QuickPic code and excellent agreement is established between the two approaches. Moreover, our new technique provides a very convenient framework for studying issues such as beam loading and short-range wakefields within the plasma cavity.

Erratum: Short-range wakefields generated in the blowout regime of plasma-wakefield acceleration [Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams 21 , 041301 (2018)

Erratum: Short-range wakefields generated in the blowout regime of plasma-wakefield acceleration [Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams <b>21</b> , 041301 (2018)

Short-range wakefields generated in the blowout regime of plasma-wakefield acceleration

In the past, calculation of wakefields generated by an electron bunch propagating in a plasma has been carried out in linear approximation, where the plasma perturbation can be assumed small and plasma equations of motion linearized. This approximation breaks down in the blowout regime where a high-density electron driver expels plasma electrons from its path and creates a cavity void of electrons in its wake. In this paper, we develop a technique that allows to calculate short-range longitudinal and transverse wakes generated by a witness bunch being accelerated inside the cavity. Our results can be used for studies of the beam loading and the hosing instability of the witness bunch in PWFA and LWFA.

Design of an X-band accelerating structure using a newly developed structural optimization procedure

An X-band high gradient accelerating structure is a challenging technology for implementation in advanced electron linear accelerator facilities. The present work discusses the design of an X-band accelerating structure for dedicated application to a compact hard X-ray free electron laser facility at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, and numerous design optimizations are conducted with consideration for radio frequency (RF) breakdown, RF efficiency, short-range wakefields, and dipole/quadrupole field modes, to ensure good beam quality and a high accelerating gradient. The designed X-band accelerating structure is a constant gradient structure with a 4π/5 operating mode and input and output dual-feed couplers in a racetrack shape. The design process employs a newly developed effective optimization procedure for optimization of the X-band accelerating structure. In addition, the specific design of couplers providing high beam quality by eliminating dipole field components and reducing quadrupole field components is discussed in detail.

Off-axis beam dynamics in rf-gun-based electron photoinjectors

The need to operate an rf-gun-based electron photoinjector with a beam emitted away from the cathode center can occur under various circumstances. First, in some cases the cathode can be affected by ion back-bombardment that progressively reduces the quantum efficiency (QE) in its center, making off-axis operation mandatory; second, in some cases the drive laser intensity can be sufficiently high to generate QE depletion in the cathode area illuminated by the laser, forcing off-axis operation; last, in cathodes with nonuniform QE distribution it could be convenient to operate off axis to exploit a better QE. However, operation in this mode may lead to growth of the projected transverse beam emittances due to correlations between the transverse and longitudinal degrees of freedom that are introduced within the gun and downstream rf cavities. A strategy is described to mitigate this emittance growth by allowing the beam to propagate along a carefully tuned off-axis trajectory in downstream rf cavities to remove the time-dependent rf kicks introduced in the gun. Along this trajectory, short range wakefields do not degrade the emittance, and long range wakefields degrade the emittance for very high repetition rate only.

Very short-range wakefields in strongly tapered disk-loaded waveguide structures

Electron bunches are very short in linear colliders but even more in linac based X-FELs. Furthermore, typical disk-loaded waveguide structures used for particle acceleration are tapered. For example in CLIC, in order to achieve high accelerating gradient, the structure is short, 26 cells, which results in strong tapering. In this paper, very short range longitudinal wake is investigated in the regime where the number of cells needed to arrive at steady state is much larger than the number of cells in a single tapered structure. In this case the very short range wake is dominated by the wake from the smallest aperture. The results of an analytical model and numeric solutions are compared.

Simulation of high order short range wakefields for particle tracking codes

We consider the effects of short range (intra bunch) wakefields in axially symmetric apertures for bunches of arbitrary shape, and show how they can be included in particle tracking codes in a computationally efficient way, including modes of any angular order. The MERLIN simulation code is given as an example. Results from these simulations strongly indicate that such higher order mode wakefield effects are not significant even for the unprecedentedly small-dimension collimation system proposed for the ILC.

On using moving windows in finite element time domain simulation for long accelerator structures

A finite element moving window technique is developed to simulate the propagation of electromagnetic waves induced by the transit of a charged particle beam inside large and long structures. The window moving along with the beam in the computational domain adopts high-order finite element basis functions through p refinement and/or a high-resolution mesh through h refinement so that a sufficient accuracy is attained with substantially reduced computational costs. Algorithms to transfer discretized fields from one mesh to another, which are the keys to implementing a moving window in a finite element unstructured mesh, are presented. Numerical experiments are carried out using the moving window technique to compute short-range wakefields in long accelerator structures. The results are compared with those obtained from the normal finite element time domain (FETD) method and the advantages of using the moving window technique are discussed.

Moving curved mesh adaptation for higher-order finite element simulations

Higher-order finite element method requires valid curved meshes in three-dimensional domains to achieve the solution accuracy. When applying adaptive higher-order finite elements in large-scale simulations, complexities that arise include moving the curved mesh adaptation along with the critical domains to achieve computational efficiency. This paper presents a procedure that combines Bezier mesh curving and size-driven mesh adaptation technologies to address those requirements. A moving mesh size field drives a curved mesh modification procedure to generate valid curved meshes that have been successfully analyzed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory researchers to simulate the short-range wakefields in particle accelerators. The analysis results for a 8-cavity cryomodule wakefield demonstrate that valid curvilinear meshes not only make the time-domain simulations more reliable, but also improve the computational efficiency up to 30%. The application of moving curved mesh adaptation to an accelerator cavity coupler shows a tenfold reduction in execution time and memory usage without loss in accuracy as compared to uniformly refined meshes.

Time Domain Boundary Element Analysis of Wake Fields in Long Accelerator Structures

We present an explicit time domain boundary element method (TDBEM) scheme with moving window technique for short-range wake field simulations of long accelerator structures. The proposed scheme is formulated by Kirchhoff's boundary integral equation of the scattered electromagnetic field in interior region problems. Implementation of a moving window technique in the framework of TDBEM is achieved by taking into account the causality and the retardation properties of the boundary integral equation. A parallelization algorithm for this moving window implementation is also proposed. The proposed TDBEM code with the moving window technique is applied to several practical examples of long accelerator structures. Numerical results obtained with the TDBEM code are compared with those of several finite integration codes.

Computational science research in support of petascale electromagnetic modeling

Computational science research components were vital parts of the SciDAC-1 accelerator project and are continuing to play a critical role in the SciDAC-2 accelerator project, the Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation (ComPASS). Presented here are recent advances and achievements in the area of computational science research in support of petascale electromagnetic modeling for accelerator design analysis, which include shape determination of superconducting RF cavities, mesh-based multilevel preconditioner for solving highly indefinite linear systems, moving window using h- or p-refinement for time-domain short-range wakefield calculations, and improved scalable application I/O.

Accurate modelling of charged particle beams in linear accelerators

A higher order, energy conserving discretization technique for beam dynamics simulations is presented. The method is based on the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) formulation. It utilizes locally refined, non-conforming grids which are designed for high spatial resolution along the path of charged particle beams. Apart from this formulation, the paper introduces a class of general symplectic integrators which conserve discrete energy in a modified sense. Specialized split-operator methods with optimum dispersion properties in the direction of particle motion are, additionally, derived. The application examples given in the paper are performed in a high performance computing environment. They include the self-consistent simulation of the RF electron gun developed by the Photo Injector Test Facility at DESY Zeuthen (PITZ) project and the computation of short range wake fields for ultra-relativistic electron bunches.