Radiation Pressure Acceleration by Ultraintense Laser Pulses

Abstract

The future applications of the short-duration, multi-MeV ion beams produced in the interaction of high-intensity laser pulses with solid targets will require improvements in the conversion efficiency, peak ion energy, beam monochromaticity, and collimation. Regimes based on Radiation Pressure Acceleration (RPA) might be the dominant ones at ultrahigh intensities and be most suitable for specific applications. This regime may be reached already with present-day intensities using circularly polarized (CP) pulses thanks to the suppression of fast electron generation, so that RPA dominates over sheath acceleration at any intensity. We present a brief review of previous work on RPA with CP pulses and a few recent results. Parametric studies in one dimension were performed to identify the optimal thickness of foil targets for RPA and to study the effect of a short-scalelength preplasma. Three-dimensional simulations showed the importance of ``flat-top'' radial intensity profiles to minimise the rarefaction of thin targets and to address the issue of angular momentum conservation and absorption.

11 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication to the special issue "EPS 2008" of PPCF

References in corpus (5)

• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• Radiation Pressure Acceleration of Thin Foils with Circularly Polarized Laser Pulses
• Laser acceleration of ion bunches at the front surface of overdense plasmas
• Laser Ion Acceleration Scaling Laws Seen in Muti-Parametric PIC Simulations
• Features of ion acceleration by circularly polarized laser pulses

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction
• "Light Sail" Acceleration Revisited
• Monoenergetic proton beams accelerated by a radiation pressure driven shock
• Relativistic Laser-Matter Interaction and Relativistic Laboratory Astrophysics
• Field-dependent BRST-antiBRST Transformations in Yang-Mills and Gribov-Zwanziger Theories
• Unlimited Energy Gain in the Laser-Driven Radiation Pressure Dominant Acceleration of Ions
• On the electrodynamic model of ultra-relativistic laser-plasma interactions caused by radiation reaction effects
• Dominance of hole-boring radiation pressure acceleration regime with thin ribbon of ionized solid hydrogen
• Finite BRST-antiBRST Transformations for the Theories with Gauge Group