Hole boring in a DT pellet and fast ion ignition with ultra-intense laser pulses

Abstract

Recently achieved high intensities of short laser pulses open new prospects in their application to hole boring in inhomogeneous overdense plasmas and for ignition in precompressed DT fusion targets. A simple analytical model and numerical simulations demonstrate that pulses with intensities exceeding 1022 W/cm2 may penetrate deeply into the plasma as a result of efficient ponderomotive acceleration of ions in the forward direction. The penetration depth as big as hundreds of microns depends on the laser fluence, which has to exceed a few tens of GJ/cm2. The fast ions, accelerated at the bottom of the channel with an efficiency of more than 20%, show a high directionality and may heat the precompressed target core to fusion conditions.

4 pages

References in corpus (2)

• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• Radiation Pressure Acceleration of Thin Foils with Circularly Polarized Laser Pulses

Cited by in corpus (17)

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• Emission and its back-reaction accompanying electron motion in relativistically strong and QED-strong pulsed laser fields
• Fast ignition of inertial fusion targets by laser-driven carbon beams
• Effect of electron heating on self-induced transparency in relativistic intensity laser-plasma interaction
• Petawatt laser absorption bounded
• High Efficiency Gamma-Ray Flash Generation via Multiple Compton Scattering
• Laser-driven hole boring and gamma-ray emission in high-density plasmas
• Suppression of transverse ablative Rayleigh-Taylor-like instability in the hole-boring radiation pressure acceleration by using elliptically polarized laser pulses
• Collisionless absorption, hot electron generation, and energy scaling in intense laser-target interaction
• Laser wakefield acceleration of ions with a transverse flying focus
• Towards Bright Gamma-Ray Flash Generation From Tailored Target Irradiated by Multi-Petawatt Laser
• Energetic spin-polarized proton beams from two-stage coherent acceleration in laser-driven plasma
• Ion heating in Laser interacting with magnetized plasma
• Collisionless shock acceleration in the corona of an inertial confinement fusion pellet with possible application to ion fast ignition
• Acceleration and focusing of multispecies ion beam using a converging laser-driven shock
• Excitation of Electrostatic Standing Wave in the Superposition of Two Counter Propagating Relativistic Whistler Waves
• Generation of quasi-monoenergetic proton beams via quantum radiative compression