Bright electron bunches from a plasma-wakefield accelerator with a steep density down-ramp

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Wood, J.C. and Boulton, L. and Beinortaitė, J. and Björklund Svensson, J. and Bohlen, S. and Boyle, G. and Garland, J. M. and Gonzalez Caminal, P. and Lindstrøm, C. A. and Loisch, G. and Mewes, S. M. and Parikh, T. and Peña, F. and Põder, K. and Schröder, S. and Thévenet, M. and Wesch, S. and Osterhoff, J. and D’Arcy, R. (2026) Bright electron bunches from a plasma-wakefield accelerator with a steep density down-ramp. Nature Communications, 17. 1588. ISSN 2041-1723 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69283-6)

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Abstract

High-brightness electron bunches drive fundamental research in particle physics and photon science. Key to achieving a high brightness is to have a low transverse emittance, which ensures that the bunch can be tightly focussed. In radiofrequency accelerators a low initial emittance can be rapidly degraded due to space charge forces, which are greatly diminished once the electron bunch attains a relativistic velocity. A plasma accelerator can maintain orders-of-magnitude higher accelerating fields than radiofrequency accelerators, while multiple techniques exist to create a low emittance electron bunch directly inside the plasma accelerator structure. Plasma accelerators therefore offer a possibility to create high-brightness bunches in wakefields driven even by low-quality drive bunches. Here we demonstrate the injection and gigavolt-per-metre acceleration of electron bunches with mm-mrad normalised emittance, O(10 pC/MeV) spectral density and per-cent-level energy spread, all with excellent reproducibility.

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