A recent study on a high energy accelerator system which involves multistage laser wakefield acceleration shows that the system is very sensitive to jitters due to misalignment between the beam and the wakefield. In particular, the effect of jitters in the presence of a strong focusing wakefield and initial phase space spread of the beam leads to severe emittance degradation of the beam. One way to improve the emittance control is to mitigate the wakefield by working with a plasma channel. However, there are limitations in this approach. Our present investigation does not involve a plasma channel. Instead of averaging over the full phase range of the quarter-wave acceleration, we treat the phase range as a variable. We have found that, for a fixed final acceleration energy and a small phase slip, the final emittance is inversely proportional to the total number of stages. This leads us to consider an accelerator system which consists of superunits, where each superunit consists of closely spaced short tubes, or chips, with the wakefield of each chip being created by an independent laser pulse. There is a relatively large gap between adjacent superunits. With this arrangement the beam electrons are accelerated with a small phase slip; i.e., the phase of the beam is approximately synchronous with respect to the wakefield. This system is designed to have resilience against jitters. It has its practical limitations. We also consider a “horn model” with an exact synchronous acceleration based on a scheme suggested by Katsouleas. Computer simulation of both the chip model and the horn model confirms an expected $(\sin \psi {)}^{3/2}$ law for emittance degradation in the small phase angle region. Thus the choice of a small loading phase together with a small phase slip provides another important ingredient in controlling emittance degradation.

• Received 5 May 2000

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.3.101301

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