Scaled simulations of a 10 GeV accelerator

Laser plasma accelerators are able to produce high quality electron beams from 1 MeV to 1 GeV. The next generation of plasma accelerator experiments will likely use a multi‐stage approach where a high quality electron bunch is first produced and then injected into an accelerating structure. In this paper we present scaled particle‐in‐cell simulations of a 10 GeV stage in the quasi‐linear regime. We show that physical parameters can be scaled to be able to perform these simulations at reasonable computational cost. Beam loading properties and electron bunch energy gain are calculated. A range of parameter regimes are studied to optimize the quality of the electron bunch at the output of the stage.