Plasma wakefield acceleration at CLARA facility in Daresbury Laboratory

A plasma accelerator research station (PARS) has been proposed to study the key issues in electron driven plasma wakefield acceleration at CLARA facility in Daresbury Laboratory. In this paper, the quasi-nonlinear regime of beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration is analysed. The wakefield excited by various CLARA beam settings are simulated by using a 2D particle-in-cell (PIC) code. For a single drive beam, an accelerating gradient up to 3 GV/m can be achieved. For a two bunch acceleration scenario, simulation shows that a witness bunch can achieve a significant energy gain in a 10–50 cm long plasma cell.