The primary objective of the Advanced Accelerator R&D Group at Argonne is to develop Dielectric Wakefield Accelerator (DWFA) enabling technologies for a multi-TeV class e+e- Linear Collider (LC) within the next 10 to 20 years. In the past 5 years, the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA) facility was transformed into a flexible, state-of-the-art LC testbed. Our scheme, dielectric Two Beam Acceleration (dielectric TBA), is based on low-cost dielectric structures operating at a gradient of 300 MeV/m and powered by a gigawatt-scale, short RF pulse (20 ns) which is derived from the AWA high-current drive beam. It has a potential to have a multi-fold cost reduction compared with current linear collider technologies. On the road to the development of a LC, we are also applying DWFA technologies to other applications, in particular the next generation light source.

Lately, two major milestones have been achieved. 100MeV/m Two Beam Acceleration and the first successful demonstration of staged acceleration using the wakefield technique where the quality of the beam is preserved through two stages. This experiment, for the first time, demonstrates the feasibility of using multiple stages in wakefield accelerators and is a necessary step towards the realization of a practical wakefield accelerator for science. The talk will cover the basic principle of dielectric wakefield acceleration, the recent progress, and applications.

Argonne Physics Division Colloquium Schedule