Modeling of E-164X Experiment

In current plasma-based accelerator experiments, very short bunches (100-150 {micro}m for E164 [1] and 10-20 {micro}m for E164X [2] experiment at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)) are used to drive plasma wakes and achieve high accelerating gradients, on the order of 10-100GV/m. The self-fields of such intense bunches can tunnel ionize neutral gases and create the plasma [3,4]. This may completely change the physics of plasma wakes. A 3-D object-oriented fully parallel PIC code OSIRIS [5] is used to simulate various gas types, beam parameters, etc. to support the design of the experiments. The simulation results for real experiment parameters are presented.