Stable Multi-Day Performance and Diagnosis of the DRACO Laser Wakefield Accelerator for Secondary Applications

We report on the operation of the DRACO Laser Driven electron source for stable multi-day operation of secondary applications with demanding beam requirements. The nC-class accelerator delivers charge densities around 10 pC/MeV*, 1 mrad rms divergence at energies up to 0.5 GeV and peak currents of over 10kA**. Precise characterisation is paramount for controlled operation of demanding applications, this includes: spectrally resolved charge diagnostic, source size diagnostics based both on betatron radiation*** as well as on coherent optical transition radiation (TR) to resolve microbunch beam structures**** and TR-based multioctave high-dynamic range spectrometry for sub-fs resolved characterisation of the 10 fs rms electron bunches**. Achieved stability allows systematic exploration of applications, resulting in the recent demonstration of the first LWFA based Beam-driven Plasma Wakefield Accelerator*****. In an effort toward LWFA based Free Electron Lasing, the COXINEL manipulation line developed at Synchrotron SOLEIL was recently installed at our facility. At initial commissioning, successful beam transport was achieved with over 13000 delivered shots within 9 experimental days.

* J.P. Couperus et al., Nat. Comm. 8 (2017)
** O. Zarini et al., PRAB (2022)
*** A. Köhler et al., PRAB (2021)
**** A. Lumpkin et al., PRL 125 (2020)
***** T. Kurz et al., Nat. Comm. 12 (2021)