Preprint UCLA-PBPL0210 Submitted to Physical Review Letters Teravolt-per-meter plasma wakefields from low-charge, femtosecond electron beams arXiv:1002.1976v1 [physics.plasm-ph] 9 Feb 2010 J. B. Rosenzweig $^{∗}$, G. Andonian$^{∗}$, P. Bucksbaum$^{†}$, M. Ferrario $^{1}$, S. Full $^{∗}$, A. Fukusawa $^{∗}$, E. Hemsing$^{∗}$, M. Hogan$^{†}$, P. Krejcik$^{†}$, P. Muggli $^{2}$, G. Marcus $^{∗}$, A. Marinelli $^{∗}$, P. Musumeci$^{∗}$, B. O’Shea$^{∗}$, C. Pellegrini$^{∗}$, D. Schiller$^{∗}$, and G. Travish∗ $^{∗}$Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA $^{†}$Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, CA 1 Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, via Enrico Fermi 40, Frascati (RM) Italy and $^{2}$University of Southern California, Dept. of Engineering Physics, Los Angeles, CA (Dated: November 15, 2018) Recent initiatives in ultra-short, GeV electron beam generation have focused on achieving sub-fs pulses for driving X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) in single-spike mode. This scheme employs very low charge beams, which may allow existing FEL injectors to produce few-100 as pulses, with high brightness. Towards this end, recent experiments at SLAC have produced ∼ 2 fs rms, low transverse emittance, 20 pC electron pulses. Here we examine use of such pulses to excite plasma wakefields exceeding 1 TV/m. We present a focusing scheme capable of producing < 200 nm beam sizes, where the surface Coulomb fields are also ∼ TV/m. These conditions access a new regime for high field atomic physics, allowing frontier experiments, including sub-fs plasma formation for wake excitation. Abstract 1