A start to end simulation of the laser plasma wakefield acceleration experiment at ESCULAP

Abstract

We present a start to end (s2e) simulation of the Laser-plasma Wakefield Accelerator (LPWA) foreseen as the ESCULAP project. We use a photo injector to produce a 5MeV 10pC electron bunch with a duration of ∼ 1 ps RMS, it is boosted to 10MeV by a S-band cavity and then compressed to 74 fs RMS (30 fs FWHM) by a magnetic compression chicane (dogleg). After the dogleg, a quadrupole doublet and a triplet are utilized to match the Twiss parameters before injecting into the subsequent plasma wakefield. A 40 TW laser is used to excite plasma wakefield in the 10 cm plasma cell. An optimized configuration has been determined yielding at the plasma exit an electron beam at 180 MeV with energy spread of ∼ 4.2%, an angular divergence of 0.6 mrad and a duration of 4 fs.