Experimental Demonstration of an Emittance-Preserving Beam Energy Dechirper Using a Hollow Channel Plasma

Plasma-based acceleration has emerged as a highly promising candidate for future colliders and compact x-ray free electron lasers owing to its capability to efficiently accelerate electron and positron beams with high brightness over short distances. However, a major obstacle to its application in free electron lasers and colliders is the imposition of a substantial energy chirp on the output beams, resulting from the longitudinally dependent acceleration field. This Letter presents the first experimental demonstration of a beam energy dechirper using a hollow plasma channel. This novel approach simultaneously enables the mitigation of energy chirp and preservation of beam emittance. Experimental results demonstrate a substantial reduction in energy spread by nearly 1 order of magnitude (from 0.93% to 0.11% FWHM), while maintaining a negligible increase in emittance. Simulation suggests that the corrected energy spread may have been reduced to ∼10  keV (0.025%), thereby meeting the stringent requirement of colliders or x-ray free electron lasers.