Permanent Magnet-Based Quadrupoles for Plasma Acceleration Sources

Abstract

The laser plasma accelerator has shown a great promise where it uses plasma wakefields achieving gradients as high as GeV/cm. With such properties, one would be able to build much more compact accelerators, compared to the conventional RF ones, that could be used for a wide range of fundamental research and applied applications. However, the electron beam properties are quite different, in particular, the high divergence, leading to a significant growth of the emittance along the transport line. It is, thus, essential to mitigate it via a strong focusing of the electron beam to enable beam transport. High-gradient quadrupoles achieving a gradient greater than 100 T/m are key components for handling laser plasma accelerator beams. Permanent magnet technology can be used to build very compact quadrupoles capable of providing a very large gradient up to 500 T/m. We present different designs, modeled with a 3D magnetostatic code, of fixed and variable systems. We also review different quadrupoles that have already been built and one design is compared to measurements.

Keywords

• quadrupoles
• permanent magnets
• laser plasma acceleration
• free electron laser