Polarized proton acceleration in ultra-intense laser interaction with near critical density plasmas

Abstract

The production of polarized proton beams with multi-GeV energies in ultra-intense laser interaction with targets is studied with three-dimensional Particle-In-Cell simulations. A near-critical density plasma target with pre-polarized proton and tritium ions is considered for the proton acceleration. The pre-polarized protons are initially accelerated by laser radiation pressure before injection and further acceleration in a bubble-like wakefield. The temporal dynamics of proton polarization is tracked via the T-BMT equation, and it is found that the proton polarization state can be altered both by the laser field and the magnetic component of the wakefield. The dependence of the proton acceleration and polarization on the ratio of the ion species is determined, and it is found that the protons can be efficiently accelerated as long as their relative fraction is less than 20%, in which case the bubble size is large enough for the protons to obtain sufficient energy to overcome the bubble injection threshold.

arXiv comment6 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (14)

• Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems
• Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction
• Ultrarelativistic electron beam polarization in single-shot interaction with an ultraintense laser pulse
• Spin polarization of electrons by ultraintense lasers
• Polarized positron beams via intense two-color laser pulses
• Theory of Radiative Electron Polarization in Strong Laser Fields
• Polarized laser-wakefield-accelerated kiloampere electron beams
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• Ultrahigh-density spin-polarized H and D observed via magnetization quantum beats
• Scaling laws for the (de-)polarization time of relativistic particle beams in strong fields
• Generation of polarized particle beams at relativistic laser intensities
• Polarized Proton Beams from Laser-induced Plasmas
• Spin polarized proton beam generation from gas-jet targets by intense laser pulses
• Efficient injection of radiation-pressure-accelerated sub-relativistic protons into laser wakefield acceleration based on 10 PW lasers

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Spin-polarized electron beam generation in the colliding-pulse injection scheme
• Control of electron beam polarization in the bubble regime of laser-wakefield acceleration
• Acceleration of spin-polarized proton beams via two parallel laser pulses
• Generation of polarized electron beams through self-injection in the interaction of a laser with a pre-polarized plasma
• Plasma acceleration of polarized particle beams
• Generation of arbitrarily polarized muon pairs via polarized $e^{-}{e}^{+}$ collision
• Enhanced MVA of Polarized Proton Beams via PW Laser-Driven Plasma Bubble