Plasma wakefield: from accelerators to black holes

Commemorating the 2024 S. Chandrasekhar Prize, this review provides a retrospective on the genesis and evolution of plasma wakefield acceleration. It traces the journey from prehistory and the invention of the Plasma Wakefield Accelerator (PWFA), the establishment of its theoretical cornerstones, to its profound reverberations across fundamental physics, including astrophysics and analog gravity. The narrative emphasizes conceptual evolution, key theoretical breakthroughs, and future outlook, culminating in a vision for hybrid schemes and next-generation colliders. In addition to application to particle accelerators and high energy collider physics, it is found that plasma wakefield, with its ultra-intense acceleration, can also be applied to investigate gravity effects in the laboratory based on Einstein's equivalence principle. A specific example is accelerating flying relativistic plasma mirrors to investigate the celebrated black hole Hawking evaporation and the associated information loss paradox. We describe an ongoing experiment, AnaBHEL (Analog Black Hole Evaporation via Lasers), which aims at shedding some lights on the black hole information loss paradox.