Preliminary study of proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration

The idea of pro­ton bunch driv­en plas­ma wake­field ac­cel­er­a­tion was re­cent­ly pro­posed. The mo­ti­va­tion is to use an ex­ist­ing high en­er­gy pro­ton beam to drive a large am­pli­tude ac­cel­er­at­ing elec­tric field, and then ac­cel­er­ate the elec­trons to the en­er­gy fron­tier. Sim­u­la­tions of the plas­ma wake­field pro­duc­tion and ac­cel­er­a­tion pro­cess from a PIC code are given in this paper. In order to get high ac­cel­er­at­ing field, the re­quired pro­ton bunch length is ex­treme­ly small. The pre­lim­i­nary de­sign pa­ram­e­ters for bunch com­pres­sion are also pre­sent­ed.