English

Analytical estimates of proton acceleration in laser-produced turbulent plasmas

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2018-11-20 v2 Plasma Physics

Abstract

With the advent of high power lasers, new opportunities have opened up for simulating astrophysical processes in the laboratory. We show that 2nd-order Fermi acceleration can be directly investigated at the National Ignition Facility, Livermore. This requires measuring the momentum-space diffusion of 3 MeV protons produced within a turbulent plasma generated by a laser. Treating Fermi acceleration as a biased diffusion process, we show analytically that a measurable broadening of the initial proton distribution is then expected for particles exiting the plasma.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.04356,
  title  = {Analytical estimates of proton acceleration in laser-produced turbulent plasmas},
  author = {Konstantin Beyer and Brian Reville and Archie Bott and Hye-Sook Park and Subir Sarkar and Gianluca Gregori},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.04356},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

7 pages, 6 figures; Added missing plasma parameters in Table 1, improved consideration of additional broadening