Increased laser-accelerated proton energies via direct laser-light-pressure acceleration of electrons in microcone targetsa)
By S. Gaillard, T. Kluge, K. Flippo, M. Bussmann, B. Gall, T. Lockard, M. Geissel, D. Offermann, M. Schollmeier, Y. Sentoku and 1 more. 2011
160 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present experimental results showing a laser-accelerated proton beam maximum energy cutoff of 67.5 MeV, with more than 5 × 106 protons per MeV at that energy, using flat-top hollow microcone targets. This result was obtained with a modest laser energy of ∼80 J, on the high-contrast Trident laser at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 2D particle-in-cell simulations, we attribute the source of these enhanced proton energies to direct laser-light-pressure acceleration of electrons along the inner cone wall surface, where the laser light wave accelerates electrons just outside the surface critical density, in a potential well created by a shift of the electrostatic field maximum with respect to that of the magnetic field maximum. Simulations show that for an increasing acceleration length, the continuous loading of electrons into the accelerating phase of the laser field yields an increase in high-energy electrons.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Mechanics of Materials, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39929a9fc2c1779e675ae346b8079b6b77e2d07e
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In Mechanics of Materials
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction (2013, background): “Recently, an energy cutoff increase up to 67.5 MeV, 35% higher than for comparator flat foil shots, was demonstrated by Gaillard et al. (2011) using specially devised targets, namely, flattop hollow microcones (Flippo et al., 2008), which are a modification of conical targets used in fast ignition…”