Modeling TeV Class Plasma Afterburners

Plasma wakefield acceleration can sustain acceleration gradients three orders of magnitude larger than conventional RF accelerator. In the recent E164X experiment, substantial energy gain of about 3-4 GeV has been observed. Thus, a plasma afterburner, which has been proposed to double the incoming beam energy for a future linear collider, is now of great interest. In an afterburner, a particle beam drives a plasma wave and generates a strong wakefield which has a phase velocity equal to the velocity of the beam. This wakefield can then be used to accelerate part of the drive beam or a trailing beam. Several issues such as the efficient transfer of energy and the stable propagation of both the drive and trailing beams in the plasma are critical to the afterburner concept. We investigate the nonlinear beam-plasma interaction in such scenario using the 3D computer modeling code QuickPIC. We will report on the preliminary simulation results of both 100 GeV and 1 TeV plasma afterburner stages for electrons including the beam-loading of a trailing beam. Analytic analysis of hosing instability in this regime will be presented