Formation of temporally shaped electron bunches for beam-driven collinear wakefield accelerators

Abstract

Beam-driven collinear wakefield accelerators (CWAs) that operate by using slow-wave structures or plasmas hold great promise toward reducing the size of contemporary accelerators. Sustainable acceleration of charged particles to high energies in the CWA relies on using field-generating relativistic electron bunches with a highly asymmetric current profile and a large energy chirp. A new approach to obtaining such bunches has been proposed and illustrated with the accelerator design supported by particle tracking simulations. It has been shown that the required particle distribution in the longitudinal phase space can be obtained without collimators, giving CWAs an opportunity for employment in applications requiring a high repetition rate of operation.