Efficient ion acceleration and dense electron-positron plasma creation in ultra-high intensity laser-solid interactions

Abstract

The radiation pressure of next generation ultra-high intensity ($>10^{23}$ W/cm${}^2$) lasers could efficiently accelerate ions to GeV energies. However, nonlinear quantum-electrodynamic effects play an important role in the interaction of these laser pulses with matter. Here we show that these effects may lead to the production of an extremely dense ($\sim 10^{24}$ cm${}^{-3}$) pair-plasma which absorbs the laser pulse consequently reducing the accelerated ion energy and energy conversion efficiency by up to 30-50\% \& 50-65\%, respectively. Thus we identify the regimes of laser-matter interaction where either ions are efficiently accelerated or dense pair-plasmas are produced as a guide for future experiments.

References in corpus (21)

• Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems
• Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction
• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• An NNLO subtraction formalism in hadron collisions and its application to Higgs boson production at the LHC
• Prolific pair production with high-power lasers
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• Radiation Reaction Effects on Radiation Pressure Acceleration
• Monoenergetic proton beams accelerated by a radiation pressure driven shock
• Laser absorption via QED cascades in counter propagating laser pulses
• Seeded QED cascades in counter propagating laser pulses
• Scaling the Yield of Laser-Driven Electron-Positron Jets to Laboratory Astrophysical Applications
• Spin polarization of electrons by ultraintense lasers
• Signatures of quantum effects on radiation reaction in laser -- electron-beam collisions
• Synchrotron radiation, pair production and longitudinal electron motion during 10-100PW laser solid interactions
• Laser-driven hole boring and gamma-ray emission in high-density plasmas
• On the electrodynamic model of ultra-relativistic laser-plasma interactions caused by radiation reaction effects
• QED-driven laser absorption

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Charged particle motion and radiation in strong electromagnetic fields
• Relativistic Plasma Physics in Supercritical Fields
• Benchmarking semiclassical approaches to strong-field QED: nonlinear Compton scattering in intense laser pulses
• Electron spin polarization in realistic trajectories around the magnetic node of two counter-propagating, circularly polarized, ultra-intense lasers
• Identifying the electron-positron cascade regimes in high-intensity laser-matter interactions
• Brilliant attosecond γ-ray emission and high-yield positron production from intense laser-irradiated Nano-Micro array
• Spin and polarization effects on the nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production in laser-plasma interaction
• Gamma-Flash Generation in Multi-Petawatt Laser-Matter Interactions
• Efficiency of radiation friction losses in laser-driven "hole boring" of dense targets
• Hydrodynamical model of QED cascade expansion in an extremely strong laser pulse
• Realising Single-Shot Measurements of Quantum Radiation Reaction in High-Intensity Lasers
• High-order corrections to the radiation-free dynamics of an electron in the strongly radiation-dominated regime
• Beamstrahlung-enhanced disruption in beam-beam interaction
• Ion-acoustic solitons in a relativistic Fermi plasma at finite temperature
• Laser-driven vacuum breakdown waves
• Energy enhancement of laser-driven ions by radiation reaction and Breit-Wheeler pair production in the ultra-relativistic transparency regime
• High-order harmonic generation in an electron-positron-ion plasma