Laser plasma wakefield acceleration gain enhancement by means of accelerating Bessel pulses

In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance the electron energy gain in standard laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerators, using accelerating Bessel pulses with tunable group velocity so to avoid electron dephasing. We use in the numerical simulations a one-dimensional theoretical model in the linear regime, taking advantage of the “diffraction-free” properties of the localized Bessel beam and thus neglecting transverse effects during the acceleration process. With a multistage tailoring approach, we show a gain enhancement of more than 100 with electron energies that may reach the GeV range over distances shorter than 1 m.