Plasma acceleration is a technique for accelerating charged particles, such as electrons, positrons, and ions, using the electric field associated with electron plasma wave or other high-gradient plasma structures (like shock and sheath fields). The plasma acceleration structures are created either using ultra-short laser pulses or energetic particle beams that are matched to the plasma parameters. These techniques offer a way to build high performance particle accelerators of much smaller size than conventional devices. The basic concepts of plasma acceleration and its possibilities were originally conceived by Toshiki Tajima and Prof. John M. Dawson of UCLA in 1979. The initial experimental designs for a "wakefield" accelerator were conceived at UCLA by Prof. Chan Joshi et al. Current experimental devices show accelerating gradients several orders of magnitude better than current particle accelerators over very short distances, and about one order of magnitude better (1 GeV/m vs 0.1 GeV/m for an RF accelerator) at the one meter scale.