A Review of Laser-Plasma Ion Acceleration

Abstract

An overview of research on laser-plasma based acceleration of ions is given. The experimental state of the art is summarized and recent progress is discussed. The basic acceleration processes are briefly reviewed with an outlook on hybrid mechanisms and novel concepts. Finally, we put focus on the development of engineered targets for enhanced acceleration and of all-optical methods for beam post-acceleration and control.

Revisit on ion acceleration mechanisms in solid targets driven by intense laser pulses

“…Note that the scalings listed here are those often mentioned before and some of them have been demonstrated by experiments [29,33,49]. More detailed discussions could be found in [26][27][28] and references therein. On the one hand, from the experimental point of view, TNSA is the most robust mechanism, as it does not have special requirements on the target and pulse contrast.…”

“…Meanwhile, some other experiments were also performed on the laser systems with short pulse durations. Though the maximum energies are far smaller, the scaling suggested is higher ( µ I i 0 ) [28,67,68]. Unfortunately, this high scaling is obtained from less powerful laser and as indicated in [69], this high scaling will degrade to I 0 1 2 for more powerful laser.…”

“…Due to the limitation of target fabrication technology, underdense or near critical targets related to near-infrared laser pulses are very difficult to manufacture, particularly with small longitudinal size (about ten micrometers) [25]. Thus previous experiments mainly focused on the acceleration mechanisms in solid targets [26][27][28], especially the TNSA [1][2][3][29][30][31] and RPA [32][33][34][35][36] mechanisms, as TNSA is the most robust mechanism in experiments and RPA promises very attractive features.…”

Influence of target-rear-side short scale length density gradients on laser-driven proton acceleration

“…Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. over the past two decades [1]. This has been driven both by exploration of the underpinning physics and by applications of the unique properties of the beams of energetic ions, including for isochoric heating of matter [2], radiographic density probing of materials with micrometre accuracy [3] and to probe highly transient electric and magnetic fields in plasmas with picosecond resolution [4].…”

Electron and ion acceleration from femtosecond laser-plasma peeler scheme

“…Laser-driven ion acceleration [1][2][3] has a wide range of prospective applications including proton radiography for ultrafast science and implosion dynamics [4,5], production of warm dense matter [6,7], nuclear physics [8], tumor therapy [9], fast ignition [10], injectors for conventional accelerators [11], etc. Many of these applications prefer quasimonoenergetic ion beams.…”