Development of plasma source for plasma Wakefield accelerator experiment at the Institute for Plasma Research

The development of the prototype plasma source for the proposed Plasma Wakefield Accelerator (PWFA) experiment is currently being carried out at the Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhinagar as part of the accelerator programme. A prototype 40 cm heat pipe oven for generation of lithium vapour column and photo-ionized lithium plasma is currently in the final phase of development before scaling up the device to generate 1 m plasma which is required for the PWFA experiment. The Li vapour as well as the UV laser ionized Li plasma were studied and optimized using optical absorption and emission spectroscopy techniques. Values of the line integrated neutral density of Li (n0L) were found to be of the order of 1017-1018 cm-3 for heat-pipe oven temperature range from 600-800℃, which are sufficient to generate the required plasma density of (1013-1014 cm-3) for PWFA experiments. (author)