1. Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquée, Ecole Polytechnique, ENSTA, CNRS, UMR 7639, 91761 Palaiseau, France
2. Institut fur Theoretische Physik, 1, Heinrich-Heine-Universitat Duesseldorf, 40225 Duesseldorf, Germany
3. Département de Physique Théorique et Appliquée, CEA/DAM Ile-de-France, 91680 Bruyères-le-Châtel, France

Correspondence to: V. Malka¹ Email: victor.malka@ensta.fr

Particle accelerators are used in a wide variety of fields, ranging from medicine and biology to high-energy physics. The accelerating fields in conventional accelerators are limited to a few tens of MeV m^-1, owing to material breakdown at the walls of the structure. Thus, the production of energetic particle beams currently requires large-scale accelerators and expensive infrastructures. Laser–plasma accelerators¹ have been proposed as a next generation of compact accelerators because of the huge electric fields they can sustain^{2, 3, 4, 5} (>100 GeV m^-1). However, it has been difficult to use them efficiently for applications because they have produced poor-quality particle beams with large energy spreads^{2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}, owing to a randomization of electrons in phase space. Here we demonstrate that this randomization can be suppressed and that the quality of the electron beams can be dramatically enhanced. Within a length of 3 mm, the laser drives a plasma bubble¹¹ that traps and accelerates plasma electrons. The resulting electron beam is extremely collimated and quasi-monoenergetic, with a high charge of 0.5 nC at 170 MeV.

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