Generation of high-energy monoenergetic heavy ion beams by radiation pressure acceleration of ultra-intense laser pulses

Abstract

A novel radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) regime of heavy ion beams from laser-irradiated ultrathin foils is proposed by self-consistently taking into account the ionization dynamics. In this regime, the laser intensity is required to match with the large ionization energy gap when the successive ionization of high-Z atoms passing the noble gas configurations [such as removing an electron from the helium-like charge state $(\text{Z}-2{)}^{+}$ to $(\text{Z}-1{)}^{+}$]. While the target ions in the laser wing region are ionized to low charge states and undergo rapid dispersions due to instabilities, a self-organized, stable RPA of highly-charged heavy ion beam near the laser axis is achieved. It is also found that a large supplement of electrons produced from ionization helps preserving stable acceleration. Two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that a monoenergetic ${\text{Al}}^{13+}$ beam with peak energy $1\text{GeV}$ and energy spread of $5\%$ is obtained by lasers at intensity $7\times 10^{20}\text{W}/{\text{cm}}^2$.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Radiation Pressure Acceleration of Thin Foils with Circularly Polarized Laser Pulses
• Suppression of transverse ablative Rayleigh-Taylor-like instability in the hole-boring radiation pressure acceleration by using elliptically polarized laser pulses

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