Speaker
Description
High-energy muon beams have broad potential in frontier scientific research, including muon colliders, as well as in applications such as muon imaging. However, owing to the short lifetime of muons, a significant fraction of muons decay before reaching high energies when accelerated using conventional techniques. To enable high-gradient acceleration with large energy gain while preserving beam quality, we propose using high-intensity, high-energy heavy-ion beams to drive plasma wakefields. The large energy content and high rigidity of heavy-ion beams make them attractive drivers for sustained high-gradient muon acceleration.
A major challenge arises from the velocity difference between the heavy-ion driver and the accelerated muons, which causes rapid phase slippage between the muon bunch and the accelerating wakefield. To mitigate this dephasing, two schemes, namely multistage plasma–vacuum phase resetting and alternating-density plasma acceleration, have been proposed and investigated using two-dimensional simulations. In the multistage plasma–vacuum scheme, muons are accelerated from 850 MeV to 2.5 GeV over a total plasma length of 2 m, corresponding to an average effective acceleration gradient of approximately 1 GV/m. The energy gain can be further increased by cascading additional plasma stages. Future work will extend these studies to three-dimensional simulations and investigate higher-gradient muon acceleration using the alternating-density plasma scheme. Proof-of-principle experiments are also planned at the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) in China.
