Plasma accelerators

In this paper the authors discuss plasma accelerators which might provide high gradient accelerating fields suitable for TeV linear colliders. In particular the authors discuss two types of plasma accelerators which have been proposed, the Plasma Beat Wave Accelerator and the Plasma Wake Field Accelerator. The authors show that the electric fields in the plasma for both schemes are very similar, and thus the dynamics of the driven beams are very similar. The differences appear in the parameters associated with the driving beams. In particular to obtain a given accelerating gradient, the Plasma Wake Field Accelerator has a higher efficiency and a lower total energy for the driving beam. Finally, we show for the Plasma Wake Field Accelerator that one can accelerate high quality low emittance beams and, in principle, obtain efficiencies and energy spreads comparable to those obtained with conventional techniques