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abstract:
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A new scheme for plasma electron injection into an acceleration phase of a plasma wake field is presented. In this scheme, a short single electron beam bunch is sent through an underdense plasma with a sharp downward density transition and some plasma electrons are trapped in the plasma wake field due to the rapid wavelength increase of the wake wave at the density transition. To investigate the trapping and acceleration mechanism, two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations were performed, and the illustrative 2-D simulation shows that the new injection method can produce a relatively large charge (~0.5 nC), short (~1 ps) and high energy (> driving beam energy) electron beam pulse with a plasma density transition from 5x10(13) cm(-3) to 3.5x10(13) cm(-3). In addition to the 2-D simulations, 1-D analytic work based on the Hamiltonian formalism and 1D simulations have been performed and the results are also presented. Finally, a proposed experiment at the Neptune Laboratory of UCLA is described.
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