Single-shot wakefield measurement system

A new experimental technique for the accurate measurements of wakefields is presented. Knowledge of wakefields is required for many applications ranging from the suppression of wakefields that arise from geometrical discontinuities to the enhancement of wakefields in structure and plasma based wakefield accelerators. In the past, direct measurements of wakefields were done with the drive-witness technique wherein the delay of a short witness beam trailing collinearly behind a high-charge drive beam is scanned over multiple shots and the wakefield is inferred from the energy spectrum of the witness beam. That technique is limited by shot-to-shot jitter, overlap of the drive and witness energy spectrum and the loss of all time-domain information. In this paper, we describe a new technique that overcomes these limitations by measuring the longitudinal phase space of a long witness beam and the drive beam in a single shot. We conclude by presenting experimental results to demonstrate its feasibility using a dielectric structure wakefield accelerator.