Scaling of proton acceleration driven by petawatt-laser–plasma interactions

Laser-ion accelerators: State-of-the-art and scaling laws

“…Up to now, the maximum energy of protons accelerated from solid targets in the TNSA (target normal sheath acceleration) regime is 67.5 MeV [1]. This energy was achieved for special flat top hollow microcone target at Trident laser, while the highest energies obtained in TNSA from flat foils are of the order of 60 MeV (obtained on the Nova [2] and VULCAN Petawatt [3] systems). Highest energies reported for ultra-short laser pulses (10s of fs, on the JKaren laser) are of the order of 40 MeV [4]; there are reports of yet unpublished results showing higher energies (120 MeV protons and carbon ions with 80 MeV per nucleon) obtained in the Break Out Afterburner regime at the Trident laser, Los Alamos National Laboratory [5].…”

“…While intensities of the order of 10 22 W/cm 2 [4] have been reported, in practice the maximum on-target intensities achieved in experiments so far are ~ 10 21 W/cm 2 (e.g. [3][4], [6]). A next generation of laser facilities will allow higher intensities than this value, hence paving the way towards higher ion energies.…”

“…Two trend lines are overlayed, the shallower one corresponding to (Iλ 2 ) 1/2 dependence, and the steeper one indicating a scaling law proportional to Iλ 2 . In [3] it is suggested that the observed (Iλ 2 ) 1/2 scaling, if maintained at higher intensities, would lead to 200 MeV cut-off energies (at the high end of the range of relevance for cancer therapy) at intensities of the order of 5 10 21 W/cm 2 . FIGURE 1.…”

One-dimensional electromagnetic relativistic PIC-hydrodynamic hybrid simulation code H-VLPL (hybrid virtual laser plasma lab)

“…On the contrary, there is a demand to simulate high density plasmas, e.g., in the experiments where the laser pulse interacts with solid targets [7]. The solid state density plasmas densities vary over a range 100 − 1000 n c , where n c = mω 2 /4πe 2 is the critical plasma density.…”

Characterisation of deuterium spectra from laser driven multi-species sources by employing differentially filtered image plate detectors in Thomson spectrometers

“…With currently accessible intensities (in excess of 10 20 W cm −2 ) of short pulse lasers, ions can be accelerated to high energies (up to several tens of MeV/nucleon) with promising beam parameters for several potential applications in science, industry and healthcare [1][2][3] . A number of acceleration mechanisms, such as Target Normal Sheath Acceleration (TNSA) 4,5 , Radiation Pressure Acceleration (RPA) [6][7][8][9] , Break-Out Afterburner (BOA) 10,11 , are objects of intense investigation both experimentally and theoretically in order to improve the beam parameters. a) Electronic mail: s.kar@qub.ac.uk Laser accelerated ion beams from solid targets are typically multi-species, either due to the chemical composition of the target material or due to the layer of contamination over the target (typically composed of water vapour and hydrocarbons) 12,13 .…”