The Los Alamos National Laboratory plasma wakefield experiment

The electron beam from the Sub-Picosecond Accelerator at Los Alamos National Laboratory has been used as the drive beam in an electron beam driven, plasma wake-field accelerator experiment. The electron beam was directed into a plume of xenon gas from a supersonic jet. After the first two micro-pulses in the electron beam ionized the xenon, subsequent beam bunches experienced strong wake-field effects. The charge per bunch for our electron beam varied from 1 - 2 nC and the pulse length of our micro-pulses was approximately 2 ps root-mean-squared (rms). We observed deceleration gradients from the plasma wakefields as high as 74 MV/m over a 3 mm interaction length. In this paper we present our current results and future goals of the experiment