Speaker
Description
Beam-driven plasma-wakefield accelerators offer significant potential as compact, high-gradient, high-quality accelerators, either as the basis of a future plasma-based facility or as an ‘after-burner’ stage appended to conventional accelerators to boost their peak energy. To maximise applicability of such devices, plasma-based accelerators must be capable of operating at repetition-rates consistent with, or exceeding, existing state-of-the-art conventional accelerator facilities. This contribution discusses results obtained at the FLASHForward experiment at DESY: a plasma-wakefield-acceleration experiment driven by the FLASH accelerator, which is capable of providing nC-level, GeV-scale electron bunches to the plasma accelerator stage at up to 3 MHz repetition rates. Of these results, the definition of the maximum possible repetition rate of a plasma-wakefield accelerator, as dictated by the time it takes for the plasma to recover to its initial state after a wakefield has been driven, will be highlighted. This result—indicating that repetition rates at the level of O(10 MHz) are attainable in future—makes it worthwhile to consider a high-repetition-rate after-burner stage for FLASH. This contribution will conclude with further results and concepts of how to achieve this goal.
