Compared to conventional particle accelerators, plasmas can sustain accelerating fields that are thousands of times higher. To exploit this ability, massively parallel SciDAC particle simulations provide physical insight into the development of next-generation accelerators that use laser-driven plasma waves. These plasma-based accelerators offer a path to more compact, ultra-fast particle and radiation sources for probing the subatomic world, for studying new materials and new technologies, and for medical applications.

Accelerator optimization requires detailed study of many parameters, indicating the need for remote control and automated data acquisition systems. A control and data acquisition system based on a network of commodity PCs and applications with standards based inter-application communication is being built for the l'OASIS accelerator facility. This system allows synchronous acquisition of data at high (> 1 Hz) rates and remote control of the accelerator at low cost, allowing detailed study of the acceleration process.

Laser wakefield accelerators produce accelerating gradients up to hundreds of GeV/m, and recently demonstrated 1-10 MeV energy spread at energies up to 1 GeV using electrons self-trapped from the plasma. Controlled injection and staging may further improve beam quality by circumventing tradeoffs between energy, stability, and energy spread/emittance. We present experiments demonstrating production of a stable electron beam near 1 MeV with hundred-keV level energy spread and central energy stability by using the plasma density profile to control selfinjection, and supporting simulations. Simulations indicate that such beams can be post accelerated to high energies,potentially reducing momentum spread in laser acceleratorsby 100-fold or more.

A GeV-class laser-driven plasma-based wakefield accelerator has been realized at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The device consists of the 40TW high repetition rate Ti:sapphire LOASIS laser system at LBNL and a gas-filled capillary discharge waveguide developed at Oxford University. The operation of the capillary discharge guided laser plasma wakefield accelerator with a capillaryof 225 mu m diameter and 33 mm in length was analyzed in detail. The input intensity dependence suggests that excessive self-injection causes increased beam loading leading to broadband lower energy electron beam generation. The trigger versus laser arrival timing dependence suggests that the plasma channel parameters can be tuned to reduce beam divergence.

An optical injection scheme for a laser-plasma based accelerator which employs a non-collinear counter-propagating laser beam to push background electrons in the focusing and acceleration phase via ponderomotive beat with the trailing part of the wakefield driver pulse is discussed. Preliminary experiments were performed using a drive beam of a_0 = 2.6 and colliding beam of a_1 = 0.8 both focused on the middle of a 200 mu m slit jet backed with 20 bar, which provided ~; 260 mu m long gas plume. The enhancement in the total charge by the colliding pulse was observed with sharp dependence on the delay time of the colliding beam. Enhancement of the neutron yield was also measured, which suggests a generation of electrons above 10 MeV.

The skewness of the envelope function of 20 - 100 femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser pulses has been controlled by appropriate choice of the higher order special phase coefficients, and used for optimization of a plasma wakefield electron accelerator.