Design and Simulation of Capillary Discharge Plasmas for Next Generation Plasma Wakefield Accelerators

Fundamental improvements to the energy, brightness, and stability of lepton beams from next generation plasma-based accelerators are essential to maintain rapid innovation and scientific productivity within the field of advanced accelerators.Meeting these goals requires improvements in the design and control of the plasmas used for injection and acceleration.Laser plasma accelerators benefit from shaped densities that guide the drive laser, while beam-driven wakefield accelerators for positrons require near-hollow channel profiles.Capillary discharge plasmas promise tailored profiles for both types of sources, as well as for lenses needed for staged acceleration.However, improved modeling tools are required to advance the technology.We are developing high-fidelity simulations of capillary discharge plasmas using the publicly available multiphysics code FLASH.We are augmenting the code to permit matching and guiding of intense lasers, the inclusion of embedded gas jets for downramp injection, and the generation of hollow-channel plasmas for positron wakefield acceleration and other advanced concepts.We are facilitating collaborations with plasma accelerator facilities to provide simulation support, experimental benchmarks, and tailored, easy-to-use FLASH interfaces.RadiaSoft has validated FLASH’s capabilities to model capillary discharge plasmas, including laser deposition, with a series of 2D benchmarks against previous work.We have formed collaborations with several facilities to compare our simulations to recent experiments, including active plasma lenses with high Z species.We have developed a prototype FLASH interface for simulations of capillary discharge plasmas, based on our open source Sirepo architecture.We will extend our simulations to realistic 3D geometries, including inflows and outlets, and nonuniform capillary boundaries, segmented structures, and rectangular cross sections.We will perform parametric studies of plasma sources for PWFA and LWFA applications, including laser heating and longitudinal background density variations.Our studies will include capillaries with multiple species, including high-Z components, for ionization injection applications.We will continue our research into active plasma lenses, in support of experimental efforts to produce aberration-free lenses.We will enrich our browser-based interface to include these new tools, and host it on RadiaSoft servers, to make it accessible to the broader community of FLASH users.RadiaSoft’s commercialization strategy is to provide highly skilled scientific and engineering R&D consulting across a broad range of markets.We will leverage our open-source scientific application framework Sirepo to provide sophisticated simulation support for targeted industry and research partners, beginning with the broader FLASH community.Our target customers are businesses interested in computation fluid dynamics simulations, which have industrial applications in automotive, aerospace, defense, and energy markets.