Active transverse stabilization of laser plasma accelerator electron beam source

Laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) have several unique features, including compactness and the ability to produce high brightness beams, which make them an attractive alternative for a wide range of accelerator-based applications like light sources and future colliders. However, using them as alternatives to conventional linacs presents several challenges that must be addressed. In particular, applications like an XFEL or collider require transverse stability of the electron beam source to be a small fraction of a beam size, which can be a substantial challenge given typical LPA beams are micron scale in size. We report substantial improvement in the transverse stability of LPA generated beams achieved by the integration of a non-destructive fast active-feedback system to stabilize a high power wakefield driver. Nearly a factor of four improvement is made in the positional jitter of the electron beam source from 12.5 to 3 microns. Slow drifts (<1 Hz) as well as shot-to-shot jitter at frequencies up to ~20Hz are nearly eliminated. This is an important step in improving electron beam source stability in LPAs which will result in improved accelerator performance and help bridge the gap from proof-of-concept experiments to applications.