A fully plasma based electron injector for a linear collider or XFEL

We demonstrate through high-fidelity particle-in-cell simulations a simple approach for efficiently generating 20+ GeV electron beams with the necessary charge, energy spread, and emittance for use as the injector for an electron arm of a future linear collider or a next generation XFEL. The self-focusing of an unmatched, relatively low quality, drive beam results in self-injection by elongating the wakefield excited in the nonlinear blowout regime. Over pump depletion distances, the drive beam dynamics and self-loading from the injected beam leads to extremely high quality and high energy output beams. For plasma densities of 10¹⁸ \ cm⁻³, PIC simulation results indicate that self-injected beams with 0.52 \ nC of charge can be accelerated to ~ 20 GeV energies with projected energy spreads, 1% within the beam core, slice normalized emittances as low as 110 \ nm, a peak normalized brightness 10¹⁹ \ A/m²/rad², and energy transfer efficiencies 54%.