  We present numerical simulations results on the injection and acceleration of
a 10 MeV, 10 pC electrons beam in a plasma wave generated in a gas cell by a
2J, 45 fs laser beam. This modeling is related to the ESCULAP project in which
the electrons accelerated by the PHIL photo-injector is injected in a gas cell
irradiated by the laser beam of the LASERIX system. Extensive modeling of the
experiment was performed in order to determine optimal parameters of the laser
plasma configurations. This was done with the newly developed numerical code
WakeTraj . We propose a configuration that benefits of a highly compressed
electron bunch and for which the injected electron beam can be efficiently
coupled to the plasma wave and accelerated up to 140 MeV, with an energy spread
lower than 5%.
