Modeling Acceleration of a High Brightness Electron Beam by Plasma Wakefield

Considerable interest has been shown in the last few decades in the Plasma Wakefield Acceleration (PWFA). This plasma acceleration scheme has demonstrated to produce ac- celerating gradients greater by at least two orders of magnitude higher than the ones obtainable with conventional accelerating techniques employing radio-frequency metallic cavities. Nonetheless, the quality of the plasma accelerated beams is still not comparable with the one obtainable with conventional accelerating techniques. The modeling and the numerical simulation of Plasma Wakefield Acceleration (PWFA) of electrons are ad- dressed in this work, prompted by the need of studies aimed to improve the quality of the electron beams accelerated through this technique. Models and numerical tools of interest for efficient experimental design for the COMB experiment planned at SPARC LAB fa- cility in Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati are presented. The issues involved in realizing a plasma acceleration process which maintains the accelerated beams quality and their pos- sible solutions are discussed. The novel time-explicit hybrid kinetic fluid code Architect, developed for this thesis work, is presented and the comparison of its results with the 3D fully kinetic code ALaDyn is shown. The code accuracy and speed make it suitable for quick parametric scans. Applications of the code flexibility in the study of experimental PWFA scenarios are shown in the framework of the COMB experiment.