Ion acceleration with an ultra-intense two-frequency laser tweezer
Abstract
Ultra-intense lasers produce and manipulate plasmas, allowing to locally generate extremely high static and electromagnetic fields. This Letter presents a concept of an ultra-intense optical tweezer, where two counter-propagating circularly polarized intense lasers of different frequencies collide on a nano-foil. Interfering inside the foil, lasers produce a beat wave, which traps and moves plasma electrons as a thin sheet with an optically controlled velocity. The electron displacement creates a plasma micro-capacitor with an extremely strong electrostatic field, that efficiently generates narrow-energy-spread ion beams from the multi-species targets, e.g. protons from the hydrocarbon foils. The proposed ion accelerator concept is explored theoretically and demonstrated numerically with the multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.07290,
title = {Ion acceleration with an ultra-intense two-frequency laser tweezer},
author = {Y. Wan and I. A. Andriyash and C. -H. Pai and J. F. Hua and C. J. Zhang and F. Li and Y. P. Wu and Z. Nie and W. B. Mori and W. Lu and V. Malka and C. Joshi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07290},
year = {2019}
}