EuPRAXIA, a Step Toward a Plasma-Wakefield Based Accelerator With High Beam Quality

The EuPRAXIA project aims at designing the world’s first accelerator based on plasma-wakefield advanced technique, which can deliver a 5 GeV electron beam with simultaneously high charge, low emittance and low energy spread to user’s communities. Such challenging objectives can only have a chance to be achieved when particular efforts are dedicated to identify the subsequent issues and to find the way to solve them. Many injection/acceleration schemes and techniques have been explored by means of thorough simulations in more than ten European institutes to sort out the most appropriate ones. The specific issues of high charge, high beam quality and beam extraction then transfer to the user’s applications, have been tackled with many innovative approaches*. This article highlights the different advanced methods that have been employed by the EuPRAXIA collaboration and the preliminary results obtained. The needs in terms of laser and plasma parameters for such an accelerator are also summarized.