Hosing Instability of the Drive Electron Beam in the E157 Plasma-Wakefield Acceleration Experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator

In the plasma-wakefield experiment at SLAC, known as E157, an ultra-relativistic electron beam is used to both excite and witness a plasma wave for advanced accelerator applications. If the beam is tilted, then it will undergo transverse oscillations inside of the plasma. These oscillations can grow exponentially via an instability know as the electron hose instability. The linear theory of electron-hose instability in a uniform ion column predicts that for the parameters of the E157 experiment (beam charge, bunch length, and plasma density) a growth of the centroid offset should occur. Analysis of the E157 data has provided four critical results. The first was that the incoming beam did have a tilt. The tilt was much smaller than the radius and was measured to be 5.3 (micro)m/(delta)z at the entrance of the plasma (IP1.) The second was the beam centroid oscillates in the ion channel at half the frequency of the beam radius (betatron beam oscillations), and these oscillations can be predicted by the envelope equation. Third, up to the maximum operating plasma density of E157 (∼2 x 1014 cm-3), no growth of the centroid offset was measured. Finally, time-resolved data of the beam shows that up to this density, no significant growth of the tail of the beam (up to 8ps from the centroid) occurred even though the beam had an initial tilt