Near-GeV Electron Beams from the Laser Wakefield Accelerator in the “ Bubble ” Regime

This paper describes a 2D-PIC simulation of a laser wakefield accelerator in which an ultrashort, petawatt-class laser is focused and propagated through an underdense preformed plasma. We are looking at the phase-spaces of a large number of background plasma electrons that are accelerated to very high energies by the laser-induced plasma bubble. The result shows the possibility of generating a GeV-level electron beam in a few millimeters plasma size.