Speaker

John FARMER (BE-ABP-PEC)

Abstract

ALiVE: Proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration for collider applications

Current hadron accelerators can deliver energies far beyond those of lepton acceleration schemes, but this energy is divided among the partons. Plasma wakefield acceleration offers a method to transfer energy from a drive beam to a witness, allowing existing proton accelerators to be transformed into lepton machines.

Relatively little civil engineering would be required due to the high gradients which plasma offers, and the re-use of existing infrastructure makes this scheme extremely attractive. The application of this concept to a Higgs factory driven by 400 GeV protons was recently proposed [Farmer, Caldwell and Pukhov, NJP (2024)].

In the present work, we discuss the ongoing efforts to address the challenges to realising such a scheme, including options for a suitable proton source, and possible upgrade paths for particle physics applications beyond a Higgs factory.

Biography

John did his PhD on simulation methods for laser-plasma interactions at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. He moved to Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf for his postdoc, where he started working on beam-driven wakefield acceleration in plasma and joined the AWAKE project in 2015. In 2019, he moved to the Max-Planck Institute for Physics to lead the simulation effort for acceleration in AWAKE Run 2c. He is now the deputy simulation coordinator for the AWAKE collaboration, and also works on novel collider schemes based on plasma wakefield acceleration.

ATS Seminar Organisers

A. Dallocchio (EN), E. Metral (BE), M. Modena (ATS-DO), T. Stora (SY), A. Sublet (TE)