Super-Heavy Ions Acceleration Driven by Ultrashort Laser Pulses at Ultrahigh Intensity

Charge-state resolved laser acceleration of gold ions to beyond 7 MeV/u

“…While in reference 3 about a factor of 3 improvement from no heating to 40 s target heating is reported, our data do not feature any clear improvement, most likely due to the much longer laser pulse duration.…”

“…The featureless gold ion charge-state distribution spanned the region between 37 and 61 , broadly centered around the charge state 51 . While in reference 3 comparable maximum values for the gold ion kinetic energies and charge states were observed, a clear difference was observed in the much more pronounced dependence of the gold ion energy as a function of the target heating. While in reference 3 about a factor of 3 improvement from no heating to 40 s target heating is reported, our data do not feature any clear improvement, most likely due to the much longer laser pulse duration.…”

“…A comparable methodology was used in the recently reported experiment on gold ion acceleration at the CoReLS facility 3 , however, using quite different laser pulse and target properties, as shown in Table 1 . Compared to our experimental scenario at the PHELIX laser, in reference 3 a considerably shorter laser pulse (by a factor of about 23) impinged with much lower pulse energy (ca. 8 of our case), but about 27 times higher focused intensity on a composite CNF gold foil target (a single gold foil in our case).…”

“…Promising application perspectives for laser-accelerated heavy ions in the mass range of led to an awakening interest in laser-based heavy ion acceleration. Since 2015, multiple experimental papers reported on progress in laser-driven acceleration of gold ions, pushing the achieved kinetic energies from 1 MeV/u 1 to 5 MeV/u 2 to finally 6.1 MeV/u 3 . This evolution has been accompanied by several simulations 4 – 6 , which especially studied the expected gold ion charge-state distributions based on the established models of tunnel and electron impact ionization.…”

Calibration of BAS-TR image plate response to GeV gold ions

“…Thanks to the ongoing development in high-power laser technology, advanced interaction mechanisms, such as radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) 1,2 , and relativistically induced transparency (RIT) enhanced acceleration 3 , allow for an efficient acceleration of heavy ion species from the bulk of the laser-irradiated thin foil targets. Laser-acceleration of high-density bunches of heavy-ions (such as gold ions) to tens of MeV/nucleon is of particular interest for applications in nuclear physics and high-energy density physics (HEDP) 4 , and has gained popularity in recent years because of this [5][6][7][8][9] .…”