Assessment of Transverse Instabilities in Proton Driven Hollow Plasma Wakefield Acceleration

Abstract

Hollow plasma has been introduced into the proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerators to overcome the issue of beam quality degradation caused by the nonlinear transverse wakefields varying in radius and time in uniform plasma. It has been demonstrated in simulations that the electrons can be accelerated to energy frontier with well-preserved beam quality in a long hollow plasma channel. However, this scheme imposes tight requirements on the beam-channel alignment. Otherwise asymmetric transverse wakefields along the axis are induced, which could distort the driving bunch and deteriorate the witness beam quality. In this paper, by means of the 2D cartesian particle-in-cell simulations, we examine the potentially detrimental effects induced by the driving beam-channel offset and initial driver tilt, and then propose and assess the solutions to these driver inaccuracy issues.