Staged laser acceleration of high quality protons from a tailored plasma

Abstract

A new scheme of proton acceleration from a laser-driven near-critical-density plasma is proposed. Plasma with a tailored density profile allows a two-stage acceleration of protons. The protons are pre-accelerated in the laser-driven wakefields, and are then further accelerated by the collisionless shock, launched from the rear side of the plasma. The shock has a small transverse size, and it generates a strong space-charge field, which defocuses protons in such a way, that only those protons with the highest energies and low energy spread remains collimated. Theoretical and numerical analysis demonstrates production of high-energy proton beams with few tens of percents energy spread, few degrees divergence and charge of few nC. This scheme indicates the efficient generation of quasi-monoenergetic proton beams with energies up to several hundreds of MeV with PW-class ultrashort lasers.

References in corpus (12)

• Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction
• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• Laser acceleration of ion bunches at the front surface of overdense plasmas
• Laser-driven shock acceleration of monoenergetic ion beams
• Generation of GeV protons from 1 PW laser interaction with near critical density targets
• Ion acceleration from laser-driven electrostatic shocks
• Laser Accelerated Ions from a Shock Compressed Gas Foil
• Collisionless shock acceleration of narrow energy spread ion beams from mixed species plasmas using 1 $\mu$m lasers
• Ponderomotive force of quasi-particles in a plasma
• Physical mechanism of the transverse instability in radiation pressure ion acceleration
• Relativistically Induced Transparency Acceleration (RITA) of Protons and Light-ions with Ultrashort Laser Interaction with Heavy-ion Plasma Density Gradient
• Ion acceleration in "dragging field" of a light-pressure-driven piston

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Spin polarized proton beam generation from gas-jet targets by intense laser pulses
• Over-critical sharp-gradient plasma slab produced by the collision of laser-induced blast-waves in a gas jet; Application to high-energy proton acceleration
• Optimization of laser-driven proton acceleration in a near-critical-density plasma