Scintillator-based transverse proton beam profiler for laser-plasma ion sources

Abstract

A high repetition rate scintillator-based transverse beam profile diagnostic for laser-plasma accelerated proton beams has been designed and commissioned. The proton beam profiler uses differential filtering to provide coarse energy resolution and a flexible design to allow optimisation for expected beam energy range and trade-off between spatial and energy resolution depending on the application. A plastic scintillator detector, imaged with a standard 12-bit scientific camera, allows data to be taken at a high repetition rate. An algorithm encompassing the scintillator non-linearity is described to estimate the proton spectrum at different spatial locations.

Relativistically Intense Laser–Microplasma Interactions

“…Promising detectors for such application need faster evaluation than those used here. A recent trend in our scientific community is the use of electronic or opto-electronic readout detectors [274]; in the imaging scheme we can use timeof-flight methods [275,276], penetration-depth and detector-sensitivity methods as used here, or clever combinations [255,277,278] to retrieve energy distributions behind the object. The recording of initial energy distributions is a problem, which may be solved by the round target design and the resulting correlated spatio-spectral distributions of the source.…”

“…Novel particle-in-cell simulations investigate the relevant parameters that need to be optimized, in order to further increase the proton and X-ray energy for applications. The issue of fast and robust detection techniques is crucial not only to imaging schemes, but to laser-plasma accelerators in general, which is reflected in several new developments [274][275][276][277][278]291].…”

Ion Acceleration Experiment with the High Intensity, High Contrast J-KAREN-P Laser System

“…spectrometer (TOF) consisting of a vacuum tube and a plastic scintillator which is coupled with a photomultiplier and an oscilloscope. A footprint of the ion beam is measured by an online scintillator-based proton footprint monitor 8) and insertsets for each shot. A Thomson parabola spectrometer consistdetectors such as Imaging Plates measures the ion spectra for each charge state.…”

Accurate spectra for high energy ions by advanced time-of-flight diamond-detector schemes in experiments with high energy and intensity lasers

“…Moreover the high cost of such devices limits the number of possible detectors to be fielded, and their use can be in some cases highly problematic due to the high values of EMP fields typical of high energy and high intensity laser-plasma interactions [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] , that can highly affect the operation of the related electronics. The employment of scintillators together with differential filtering technique has been also proposed 21 to retrieve the proton beam profiling as well as a coarse energy estimation while working at high-repetition rate.…”