Plasma Wakefield Experiments at Facet*

FACET, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator and Experimental Tests, is a new facility being constructed in sector 20 of the SLAC linac primarily to study beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration beginning in summer 2011. The nominal FACET parameters are 23GeV, 3nC electron bunches compressed to ~20μm long and focused to ~10μm wide. The intense fields of the FACET bunches will be used to field ionize neutral lithium or cesium vapor produced in a heat pipe oven. Previous experiments at the SLAC FFTB facility demonstrated 50GeV/m gradients in an 85cm field ionized lithium plasma where the interaction distance was limited by head erosion. Simulations indicate the lower ionization potential of cesium will decrease the rate of head erosion and increase single stage performance. The initial experimental program will compare the performance of lithium and cesium plasma sources with single and double bunches. Later experiments will investigate improved performance with a pre-ionized cesium plasma. The status of the experiments and expected performance are reviewed.