Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration - a new project for the MPP

by Prof. Allen Caldwell (MPI for Physics)

Tuesday 15 Dec 2009, 17:00 → 18:30 Europe/Berlin

Plasma wakefield acceleration, either laser driven or electron-bunch driven, has been demonstrated to hold great potential for a very high gradient accelerator. These approaches will however be difficult to scale to accelerate particles up to the regime which is of interest to particle physics. We discuss the possibility of proton-bunch driven plasma wakefield acceleration, and show that TeV scale electron beams could potentially be produced in a single accelerating stage starting from a high energy proton beam. A demonstration experiment is currently under discussion at CERN, and the MPP would take a leading role in this experiment. The experiment would investigate the physics of proton driven plasma wakefields, and would lay the basis for future developments in this field. The proposed project will be described, as well as the resources which are foreseen.