Plasma suppression of beam-beam interaction in a muon collider

Limitation of the luminosity caused by the beam-beam interaction is one of the major obstacles in future colliders. In order to suppress this interact ion, there was proposed to intercept the colliding beams with a plasma at t he interaction region. In this paper, the theory of plasma compensation of beams' electric and magnetic fields is developed for arbitrary densities of beams and the plasma. Because of nonlinear effects, the compensation is sh own to depend on the charge of beam particles. The optimum plasma thickness ensuring maximum suppression of the beam-beam effects is found. An analyti cal expression for the compensation degree in the linear approximation in t he case of a finite-thickness plasma is derived, and the criterion of appli cability of the linear model is obtained. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. Al l rights reserved.