Collective deceleration: Toward a compact beam dump

With the increasing development of laser electron accelerators, electron energies beyond a GeV have been reached and higher values are expected in the near future. A conventional beam dump based on ionization or radiation loss mechanisms is cumbersome and costly, not to mention the radiological hazards. We revisit the stopping power theory of high-energy charged particles in matter and discuss the associated problem of beam dumping from the point of view of collective deceleration. The collective stopping length in an ionized gas can be several orders of magnitude shorter than that described by the Bethe-Bloch formulas and associated with multiple electromagnetic cascades in solids. At the same time, the tenuous density of the gas makes the radioactivation negligible. Such a compact beam dump without radioactivation works well for short and dense bunches, as they are typically generated from a laser wakefield accelerator. In addition, the nonuniform transverse wakefield can induce microbunching of the electron bunch by betatron oscillation. The microstructure could serve as a prebunched source for coherent radiation or feeding a free electron laser.