Applications of Thin Plasma Lenses to Focus Beams in Plasma Wakefield Accelerators

Beam-driven, underdense thin plasma lenses are a compact and tunable means of providing strong focusing to relativistic electron beams. It is necessary to focus electron beams to small sizes in a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator to preserve the beam emittance, or volume in phase space. The thin plasma lens can be used to achieve these small beam sizes that are otherwise out of reach of conventional electromagnetic beam delivery systems. Ultrashort (~ 30 fs), low energy (~ 10 mJ) laser pulses can be used to ionize a small region of gas to generate the thin plasma lens. The interplay between the ionized gas and the focusing of the laser pulse are modeled in detail to calculate experimentally achievable 3-D plasma lens profiles, which are then used in simulations of beam focusing. Plasma lens focal lengths and minimum beam sizes achievable are estimated, considering the effects of radiation reaction in both the classical and quantum regimes.