Progress on plasma lens experiments at the Final Focus Test Beam

The proposal to perform a series of plasma lens experiments at the Final Focus Test Beam at SLAC has been described earlier. We report on our progress towards validation of concepts involved in the experiments, including the laser ionized plasma production test, development of the supersonic gas jet as the plasma source, and study on focused beam size measurement techniques. Most importantly, the effects of background events due to plasma lenses in future linear collider detectors, such as that in the NLC, are studied in details and are shown to be within detector tolerances.