Plasma wakefields can enable very high accelerating gradients for frontier high energy
particle accelerators, in excess of 10 GeV/m. To overcome limits on single stage
acceleration, specially shaped drive beams can be used in both linear and nonlinear
plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA), to increase the transformer ratio, implying that the
drive beam deceleration is minimized relative to acceleration obtained in the wake. In this
Letter, we report the results of a nonlinear PWFA, high transformer ratio experiment using …

Discovery in physics over the past century has gone hand in hand with the development of
particle accelerators. From the first cyclotron accelerator in the 1930's [4] to current state of
the art facilities [5], accelerating electrons and ions to relativistic energies have allowed the
discovery of fundamental physics. The largest accelerator operating today, the Large
Hadron Collider, and other similar machines have led to our understanding of the
fundamental particles and forces in the universe [6]. This follows a historical trend of …