Physical Sciences

Particle-beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) enables various novel high-gradient techniques for powering future compact light-source and high-energy physics applications. Here, a driving particle bunch excites a wakefield response in a plasma medium, which may rapidly accelerate a trailing witness beam. In this Letter, we present the measurement of ratios of acceleration of the witness bunch to deceleration of the driver bunch, the so-called transformer ratio, significantly exceeding the fundamental theoretical and thus far experimental limit of 2 in a PWFA. An electron bunch with ramped current profile was utilized to accelerate a witness bunch with a transformer ratio of 4.6_{-0.7}^{+2.2} in a plasma with length ∼10  cm, also demonstrating stable transport of driver bunches with lengths on the order of the plasma wavelength.