The FACET facility will involve relocation, refurbishment and upgrading of accelerator components at SLAC to provide beams at a new facility in Sector 20 of the SLAC linac. The goal of the FACET facility is to deliver high quality beams for plasma wakefield accelerator research. The facility will be located upstream of the injector for SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source, as illustrated in the figure below. It will use the upstream two kilometers of the SLAC linac and a new experimental area at Sector 20 in the existing linac tunnel.
By installing a new focusing system at Sector 20, the SLAC linac electron beam can be focused and compressed in length to sizes appropriate for plasma wakefield accelerator research. Comparable power densities for positron beams will be provided with the addition of an upstream positron bunch compressor in Sector 10. A shielding wall at the end of Sector 20 will allow access to the upstream portion of the linac during LCLS operations.
The FACET facility features six main components: