Monoenergetic ion beams from ultrathin foils irradiated by ultrahigh-contrast circularly polarized laser pulses
By O. Klimo, J. Psikal, J. Limpouch, V. Tikhonchuk. 2008
239 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Acceleration of ions from ultrathin foils irradiated by intense circularly polarized laser pulses is investigated using one- and two-dimensional particle simulations. A circularly polarized laser wave heats the electrons much less efficiently than the wave of linear polarization and the ion acceleration process takes place on the front side of the foil. The ballistic evolution of the foil becomes important after all ions contained in the foil have been accelerated. In the ongoing acceleration proce ss, the whole foil is accelerated as a dense compact bunch of quasineutral plasma implying that the energy spectrum of ions is quasimonoenergetic. Because of the ballistic evolution, the velocity spread of an accelerated ion beam is conserved while the av erage velocity of ions may be further increased. This offers the possibility to control the parameters of the accelerated ion beam. The ion acceleration process is described by the momentum transfer from the laser beam to the foil and it might be fairly e fficient in terms of the energy transferred to the heavy ions even if the foil contains a comparable number of light ions or some surface contaminants. Two-dimensional simulations confirm the formation of the quasimonoenergetic spectrum of ions and relati vely good collimation of the ion bunch, however the spatial distribution of the laser intensity poses constraints on the maximum velocity of the ion beam. The present ion acceleration mechanism might be suitable for obtaining a dense high energy beam of q uasimonoenergetic heavy ions which can be subsequently applied in nuclear physics experiments. Our simulations are complemented by a simple theoretical model which provides the insights on how to control the energy, number, and energy spread of accelerate d ions.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Mechanics of Materials, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b544f8dcec1b7532e3b08ec5d97d856fbc01928
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Citations in the corpus
- Review of laser-driven ion sources and their applications (2012, background): “Third, the focal spot size must be relatively large to keep the quasi-1D dynamics; for this reason, a superGaussian or flat-top pulse is advantageous compared with a Gaussian one (Klimo et al 2008, Liseykina et al 2008, Robinson et al 2008, Bulanov S S et al 2008b).”