Proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration

Plasmas excited by laser beams or bunches of relativistic electrons have been used to produce electric fields of 10-100 GV m(-1). This has opened up the possibility of building compact particle accelerators at the gigaelectronvolt scale. However, it is not obvious how to scale these approaches to the energy frontier of particle physics-the teraelectronvolt regime. Here, we introduce the possibility of proton-bunch-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration, and demonstrate through numerical simulations that this energy regime could be reached in a single accelerating stage.