At Brookhaven National Laboratory there is an R&D program to design an Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS) for use in a compact ion injector to be developed for the relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC). The BNL effort is directed at developing an EBIS with intensities of 3 x 10 particles/pulse of ions such as Au and U, and requires an electron beam on the order of 10A. The construction of a test ...

In an inverse-Compton scattering source, in which a relativistic electron beam collides with a high-power laser pulse, the x-ray flux produced is proportional to the brightness of the two beams and the size of their overlap region in three-dimensional space. In vacuum, this overlap is limited by the diffraction of the two beams, but the diffraction limit can be overcome by confining both beams ...

We have proposed a new method of generating highly polarized positrons through Compton scattering of polarized laser lights o! relativistic electron beams and successive pair creation. To realize high-luminosity laser}electron collisions, we constructed a specially designed chamber which equips o!-axis parabolic mirrors with a through hole at the center. This mirror achieves strong focusing of ...

The transverse dynamics of a relativistic electron beam in a plasma less dense than the beam is analyzed, with particular attention to the electron-hose instability as it appears in a plasma channel of finite radius. A comparison is made between analytic asymptotic forms, linearized ‘‘beam break-up’’ simulations, and particle-in-cell simulations. The analysis provides a framework for the interp...

We report the compression of a high brightness, relativistic electron beam to rms lengths below 300 femtoseconds using the velocity compression technique in the LLNL Thomson X-ray source photoinjector. The results are consistent with analytical and computational models of this process. The emittance evolution of the beam during compression is investigated in simulation and found to be controlla...

An intense relativistic electron beam from the Naval Surface Weapons Center's Casino simulator has been transported 1.85 meters utilizing gradient-B drift in an applied magnetic field gradient produced by a straight wire. Transport efficiencies of 85-90% and beam risetime compression of up to a factor of two have been achieved routinely.

A sequential arrangement of three pairs of modulators and dispersive sections that performs precise manipulation of a relativistic electron beam’s longitudinal phase space is described. We show that using only a single laser wavelength, this scheme acts as a waveform synthesizer through linearization of local regions of phase space to generate sawtooth, triangular, and square wavetype distribut...

Initial experiments which have explored the physics of the underdense (blowout) regime of the plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA) at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator facility are reported. In this regime, the relativistic electron beam is denser than the plasma, causing the beam channel to completely rarefy, and leaving a high quality accelerating region which also contains a uniform ion colum...

Next-generation high-power laser facilities (such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure) will provide unprecedented field intensities, and will allow us to probe qualitatively new physical regimes for the first time. One of the important fundamental questions which will be addressed is particle dynamics when radiation reaction and quantum effects play a significant role. Classical theories of rad...

Recently, a scheme for producing ideal uniformly filled ellipsoidal beam distributions, which depends on the strong longitudinal expansion of an initially very short beam under its own space charge forces, has been demonstrated at the UCLA Pegasus Laboratory. Here we present further work on the characterization of this novel regime of operation of a photoinjector. In particular we study the sen...