Laser-driven hole boring and gamma-ray emission in high-density plasmas

Abstract

Ion acceleration in laser-produced dense plasmas is a key topic of many recent investigations thanks to its potential applications. Indeed, at forthcoming laser intensities ($I\gtrsim 10^{23}\text{W}{\text{cm}}^{-2}$) interaction of laser pulses with plasmas can be accompanied by copious gamma-ray emission. Here we demonstrate the mutual influence of gamma-ray emission and ion acceleration during relativistic hole boring in high-density plasmas with ultra-intense laser pulses. If gamma-ray emission is abundant, laser pulse reflection and hole-boring velocity are lower and gamma-ray radiation pattern is narrower than in the case of low emission. Conservation of energy and momentum allows one to elucidate the effects of gamma-ray emission which are more pronounced at higher hole-boring velocities.

Published in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion (http://stacks.iop.org/0741-3335/57/035007); version with all corrections

References in corpus (6)

• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• Prolific pair production with high-power lasers
• QED cascades induced by circularly polarized laser fields
• Radiation Reaction Effects on Radiation Pressure Acceleration
• Hole boring in a DT pellet and fast ion ignition with ultra-intense laser pulses
• Collisionless Weibel shocks: full formation mechanism and timing

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Charged particle motion and radiation in strong electromagnetic fields
• The effect of non-linear quantum electrodynamics on relativistic transparency and laser absorption in ultra-relativistic plasmas
• Production and dynamics of positrons in ultrahigh intensity laser-foil interactions
• Weibel instability in hot plasma flows with production of gamma-rays and electron-positron pairs
• High-order corrections to the radiation-free dynamics of an electron in the strongly radiation-dominated regime
• Collisionless shock acceleration of quasi-monoenergetic ions in ultra-relativistic regime
• High-order harmonic generation in an electron-positron-ion plasma