Prospects for laser-driven ion acceleration through controlled displacement of electrons by standing waves

Abstract

During the interaction of intense femtosecond laser pulses with various targets, the natural mechanisms of laser energy transformation inherently lack temporal control and thus commonly do not provide opportunities for a controlled generation of a well-collimated, high-charge beam of ions with a given energy of particular interest. In an effort to alleviate this problem, it was recently proposed that the ions can be dragged by an electron bunch trapped in a controllably moving potential well formed by laser radiation. Such standing-wave acceleration (SWA) can be achieved through reflection of a chirped laser pulse from a mirror, which has been formulated as the concept of chirped-standing-wave acceleration (CSWA). Here we analyze general feasibility aspects of the SWA approach and demonstrate its reasonable robustness against field structure imperfections, such as those caused by misalignment, ellipticity and limited contrast. Using this we also identify prospects and limitations of the CSWA concept.

13 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• Accelerating Protons to Therapeutic Energies with Ultra-Intense Ultra-Clean and Ultra-Short Laser Pulses
• Microengineering laser plasma interactions at relativistic intensities
• Table-top laser-based proton acceleration in nanostructured targets
• Particle-in-Cell Laser-Plasma Simulation on Xeon Phi Coprocessors
• Chirped standing wave acceleration of ions with intense lasers
• Energy partitioning and electron momentum distributions in intense laser-solid interactions