Dense blocks of energetic ions driven by multi-petawatt lasers

Abstract

Laser-driven ion accelerators have the advantages of compact size, high density, and short bunch duration over conventional accelerators. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to simultaneously enhance the yield and quality of laser-driven ion beams for practical applications. Here we propose a scheme to address this challenge via the use of emerging multi-petawatt lasers and a density-modulated target. The density-modulated target permits its ions to be uniformly accelerated as a dense block by laser radiation pressure. In addition, the beam quality of the accelerated ions is remarkably improved by embedding the target in a thick enough substrate, which suppresses hot electron refluxing and thus alleviates plasma heating. Particle-in-cell simulations demonstrate that almost all ions in a solid-density plasma of a few microns can be uniformly accelerated to about 25% of the speed of light by a laser pulse at an intensity around 1022 W/cm2. The resulting dense block of energetic ions may drive fusion ignition and more generally create matter with unprecedented high energy density.

18 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction
• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• Ion beam requirements for fast ignition of inertial fusion targets
• Suppression of transverse ablative Rayleigh-Taylor-like instability in the hole-boring radiation pressure acceleration by using elliptically polarized laser pulses
• Suppressing longitudinal double-layer oscillations by using elliptically polarized laser pulses in the hole-boring radiation pressure acceleration regime
• Reducing ion energy spread in hole-boring radiation pressure acceleration by using two-ion-species targets

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Extreme case of Faraday effect: magnetic splitting of ultrashort laser pulses in plasmas
• Collisionless electrostatic shock formation and ion acceleration in intense laser interactions with near critical density plasmas
• Efficient injection of radiation-pressure-accelerated sub-relativistic protons into laser wakefield acceleration based on 10 PW lasers
• Cascaded acceleration of proton beams in ultrashort laser-irradiated microtubes
• Progress in relativistic laser-plasma interaction with kilotesla-level applied magnetic fields
• Efficient ion acceleration driven by a Laguerre Gaussian laser in near-critical-density plasma