Highly ionized heavy ion acceleration via ultra-relativistic high fields with PW laser systems

durch Mamiko Nishiuchi (National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST))

Dienstag 29.11.2022, 11:00 → 13:00 Europe/Berlin

Highly charged energetic ions generated by the plasma attract many fields of applications including next generation ion accelerators. Although extensive attempts have been carried out around the world to produce better quality beams in a controllable manner in the past decades, there are still issues for improvement before realizing many applications, such as high energy ion generation, controllability, and so on.   

We, KPSI and HZDR have been joining forces together for optimizing ion acceleration performance in a controllable manner [1,2,3,4] by using ultra-high intensity high contrast short pulse laser systems, J-KAREN-P and DRACO-PW. We have generated energetic light ion acceleration (> 60 MeV proton and > 30 MeV/u C6+) from plastic targets and highly charged (Z*~45 of Ag and Z*~65 of Au) energetic heavy ions (> 20MeV/u of Ag and ~ 10MeV/u of Au) from metal targets by controlling the laser temporal pulse condition with less than 10 J of laser energy on target.  

Hydrodynamic and 3D particle-in-cell simulations reveal that the laser temporal components preceding the main pulse tailor the density condition of the target, enabling the main pulse to undergo relativistic transparency, which as a result forms a strong transient space-charge field for efficient proton/carbon acceleration. The robustness of the acceleration mechanism is confirmed by the similar ion acceleration performance achieved in two independent PW-class laser systems by controlling the laser temporal pulse shape [5].   

These results pave the way for the establishment of repetitive laser driven ion sources with high energy and high peak current applicable to radiobiology and material science. 

The follow-up experiment exploited these insights to accelerate protons beyond the 100 MeV frontier (will be presented by Tim Ziegler in one of the next LPA seminars). 

References

[1] N. P. Dover et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 124, 084802 (2020).

[2] M. Nishiuchi et al., Phys. Rev. Res., 2, 033081 (2020).

[3] T. Ziegler et al.,   Sci. Rep. 11,  7338 (2021).

[4] F. Kroll et al., Nat. Phys. 18 316 (2022).

[5] N.P. Dover and T. Ziegler et al submitted for publication (2022). 

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