A Look into the Crystal Ball: Plasma Wakefield Experiments on Daresbury Campus

Following the success of Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) proton collisions such as the Nobel Prize winning discovery of Higgs boson, the next generation colliders are vital for complementing the LHC results for precision measurements. Historically, a tripodal scheme has been followed for discovery, precision measurements and studies for inner structure of a proton. Generally each successor machine should push the limits of the energy frontier further.

Therefore, the particle accelerator community is in pursuit of advanced technologies that will allow more efficient, compact and cost-effective accelerators. Developing such technologies will open a new era for particle colliders as well as for medical and industrial applications. Plasma wakefield acceleration has been one of the most appealing advanced accelerating techniques during the last few decades. The technique employs the electromagnetic fields induced in a plasma by a laser or a particle beam, the so-called driver beam. Such a field can be used to accelerate a second beam, a witness beam, as if a surfer drives the waves behind a bout.

The accelerating fields measured in such plasma accelerators can be in the range 100 or 1,000 times larger than can be achieved by conventional particle accelerators. This means if this technology can be implemented in modern accelerators, we will be able to build much 100 or 1000 times smaller particle colliders and table top accelerators.

However, the beam quality preservation is still an important problem to be tackled to ensure the practicality of this technology. In this global picture, the team from the University of Manchester is planning R&D that explores the potential of the local facilities while addressing issues related to this technology.

Recently two publications were released in Physics of Plasmas summarising the potential of Daresbury Laboratory to host plasma wakefield acceleration experiments and witness beam interaction with the surrounding plasma for large scale applications such as particle colliders: Phys. Plasmas 22, 083101 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4927795 and Phys. Plasmas 22, 103117 (2015);  http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4934711.