Laser ion acceleration by using the dynamic motion of a target

Abstract

Proton acceleration by using a 620-TW, 18-J laser pulse of peak intensity of $5\times 10^{21}$ W/cm${}^2$ irradiating a disk target is examined using three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. It is shown that protons are accelerated efficiently to high energy for a "light" material in the first layer of a double-layer target, because a strongly inhomogeneous expansion of the first layer occurs by a Coulomb explosion within such a material. Moreover, a large movement of the first layer for the accelerated protons is produced by radiation-pressure-dominant acceleration. A time-varying electric potential produced by this expanding and moving ion cloud accelerates protons effectively. In addition, using the best material for the target, one can generate a proton beam with an energy of 200 MeV and an energy spread of 2.

15 pages, 18 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• Kinetics of the collisionless expansion of spherical nanoplasmas
• Tunable high-energy ion source via oblique laser pulse incidence on a double-layer target
• Control of energy distribution of the proton beam with an oblique incidence of the laser pulse

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Approach towards quasi-monoenergetic laser ion acceleration with doped target
• Proton energy behavior by variation of the target density in laser acceleration