Accelerator Physics Challenges towards a Plasma Accelerator with Usable Beam Quality

Enormous progress in compact plasma accelerators has been demonstrated over the recent years in various experiments. These experiments rely on high power, pulsed lasers or short electron bunches to excite ultra-strong wakefields in plasmas. Accelerating gradients have reached several 10 GV/m up to 100 GV/m and the absolute energy gain of electron beams is in the regime of several GeV to 30 GeV. The principle and potential of plasma accelerators has been proven impressively and performance parameters are steadily improving. It is noted that particle accelerators are powerful tools that are ultimately justified by their applications in science, medicine or industry. The demonstration of useable beam quality and a realistic use case remains to be achieved for plasma accelerators. The accelerator physics challenges to arrive at this goal are analyzed and discussed.
Proceedings of the 5th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2014, Dresden, Germany