Laser acceleration of quasi-monoenergetic MeV ion beams

By B. Hegelich, B. J. Albright, J. Cobble, K. Flippo, S. Letzring, M. Paffett, J. Schreiber, Roland K. Schulze, Juan C. Fernandez. Nature, 2006

666 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Acceleration of particles by intense laser–plasma interactions represents a rapidly evolving field of interest, as highlighted by the recent demonstration of laser-driven relativistic beams of monoenergetic electrons. Ultrahigh-intensity lasers can produce accelerating fields of 10 TV m-1 (1 TV = 1012 V), surpassing those in conventional accelerators by six orders of magnitude. Laser-driven ions with energies of several MeV per nucleon have also been produced. Such ion beams exhibit unprecedented characteristics—short pulse lengths, high currents and low transverse emittance—but their exponential energy spectra have almost 100% energy spread. This large energy spread, which is a consequence of the experimental conditions used to date, remains the biggest impediment to the wider use of this technology. Here we report the production of quasi-monoenergetic laser-driven C5+ ions with a vastly reduced energy spread of 17%. The ions have a mean energy of 3 MeV per nucleon (full-width at half-maximum ∼0.5 MeV per nucleon) and a longitudinal emittance of less than 2 × 10-6 eV s for pulse durations shorter than 1 ps. Such laser-driven, high-current, quasi-monoenergetic ion sources may enable significant advances in the development of compact MeV ion accelerators, new diagnostics, medical physics, inertial confinement fusion and fast ignition.

Subfields: Geophysics, Mechanics of Materials, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a68ea3449c44fa7f083738234537425f0b0ec59

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Citations in the corpus

A compact synchrotron radiation source driven by a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator (2008, background): “However, there we are not restricted to laser pulses, and these may be converted to another form, for example, to an electron pulse or proton puls”
Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems (2011, background): “Laser acceleration of ions provides quasimonoenergetic beams with energy of several MeVs per nucleon (Fuchs et al., 2007; Haberberger et al., 2012; Hegelich et al., 2006; Schwoerer et al., 2006; Toncian et al., 2006).”
Laser-driven particle and photon beams and some applications (2010, background): “In 2006, the first papers published on quasi-monoenergetic heavier ions appeared (Hegelich et al 2006, Schnurer et al 2006, Ter-Avetisyan et al 2006).”
Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction (2013, methodology): “Another experiment also relied on the (partial) removal of hydrogen contaminants from the surface of a palladium target (Hegelich et al., 2006) so that protons did not appear in the spectrum.”
Radiation pressure acceleration of thin foils with circularly polarized laser pulses (2007, background): “[1] and the studies done with the Nova PetaWatt laser [2, 3], there has been considerable interest in the generation of multi-MeV proton beams from thin foil targets irradiated by ultraintense lasers [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11].”
GeV laser ion acceleration from ultrathin targets: The laser break-out afterburner (2006, neutral): “Acceleration of ions via the interaction of ultra-intense lasers with thin, solid density targets is a currently a topic of intense interest ~Snavely et al., 2000; Maksimchuk et al., 2000; Chirila et al., 2004; Honrubia & Tikhonchuk, 2004; Borghesi et al., 2005; Chen & Wilks, 2005!.”