The NEPTUNE Laboratory, under construction at UCLA, will be a user facility for exploring concepts useful for advanced accelerators. [1] The programmatic goal for the laboratory is to inject extremely high quality electron bunches into a laser-driven plasma beat wave accelerator (PBWA) [2] and explore ideas for extracting a high quality DE/E < 0.1, epsilon_n < 10 pi mm-mrad), high energy (100 MeV) beam from a plasma structure operating at about 1 THz and about 3 GeV/m. The lab will combine an upgraded MARS CO2 laser and the state-of-the-art SATURNUS RF gun and linac. [3] The new MARS laser will be about 1 TW (100 J, 100 ps), up from 0.2 TW (70 J, 350 ps). This allows for doubling the spot size at the IP and quadrupling the interaction length while still driving gradients of 3 GeV/m. The SATURNUS gun will be upgraded to the Brookhaven 1.6 cell design. [4] A novel, multi-cell Plane-Wave Transformer (PWT) RF gun is also under development. [5] A sync-pumped, sub-ps dye laser is available to directly produce ultrashort electron pulses (1/5 of an accelerating bucket). Part of the research program will be devoted to studying pulse compression [6] and phaselocking techniques at these ultrahigh frequencies and diagnosing microbunches generated by such structures. [7] Finally, shaped electron pulses will be studied for the electron driven Plasma Wakefield Accelerator (PWFA) concept. 368 1997 Particle Accelerator Conference /home/httpd/docserver/releases/20080613005430/public/paper/file/93/clayton_1997_0185.pdf clayton_1997_0185.pdf 3 93 Collective acceleratorsElectron acceleratorsGas lasersParticle beam bunchingLinear accelerators [A2915D], Beams in particle accelerators [A2921], CO/sub 2/ lasers [A4255D], Particle accelerators [B7410], Particle beam handling and diagnostics [B7410B], Gas lasers [B4320C]NEPTUNE facility, advanced accelerators, electron bunches, laser-driven plasma beat wave accelerator, MARS CO/sub 2/ laser, SATURNUS RF gun, linac, plane-wave transformer RF gun, pulse compression, phase-locking, shaped electron pulses Proceedings of the 1997 Particle Accelerator Conference. Vancouver, BC, Canada. US Dept. Energy. Nat. Sci. Found. Office of Naval Res. 12-16 May 1997. Power 1.0E+12 W Frequency 1.0E+12 Hz Energy 7.0E+01 J Power 2.0E+11 W Energy 1.0E+02 J English Conference Paper 3 1998 IEEE 185 2007-07-27T23:53:35-07:00 678-80 1997