Plasma-based accelerators have been proposed for the next generation
of compact accelerators because of the huge electric fields they can
support. However, it has been difficult to use them efficiently for
applications because they produce poor quality particle beams with large
energy spreads. Here, we demonstrate a dramatic enhancement in the quality
of electron beams produced in laser-plasma interaction: an ultrashort
laser pulse drives a plasma bubble which traps and accelerates plasma
electrons to a single energy. This produces an extremely collimated and
quasi-monoenergetic electron beam with a high charge of 0.5 nanocoulomb at
energy 170 ± 20 MeV.