Related papers: Direct High-Power Laser Acceleration of Ions for M…
Intense lasers can accelerate electrons to very high energy over a short distance. Such compact accelerators have several potential applications including fast ignition, high energy physics, and radiography. Among the various schemes of…
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…
We propose an innovative fast-cycling accelerator complex conceived and designed to exploit at best the properties of accelerated ion beams for hadrontherapy. A cyclinac is composed by a cyclotron, which can be used also for other valuable…
We show that monoenergetic ion beams can be accelerated by moderate Mach number collisionless, electrostatic shocks propagating in a long scale-length exponentially decaying plasma profile. Strong plasma heating and density steepening…
We investigate the different facets of ion acceleration by a relativistically intense circularly polarized laser pulse interacting with thin near-critical density plasma targets. Our simulations establish that plasma density gradient and…
Intense laser acceleration of ions is inherently difficult due to the velocity mismatch between laser pulses moving at the speed of light and slowly moving massive ions. Instead of directly accelerating the ions, current approaches rely on…
Betatron x-ray sources from laser-plasma accelerators combine compactness, high peak brightness, femtosecond pulse duration and broadband spectrum. However, when produced with Terawatt class lasers, their energy was so far restricted to a…
The production of ion beams from the interaction of a circularly polarized laser pulse with a nanometric double-layer target is discussed in the regime where all electrons are expelled from the target by laser radiation pressure.…
The dynamics of electrons in counter-propagating, circularly polarized laser beams are shown to exhibit attractors whose ability to trap particles depends on the ratio of the beam intensities and a single parameter describing radiation…
Radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) is a highly efficient mechanism of laser-driven ion acceleration, with with near complete transfer of the laser energy to the ions in the relativistic regime. However, there is a fundamental limit on…
Laser-driven proton acceleration from novel cryogenic hydrogen target of the thickness of tens of microns irradiated by multiPW laser pulse is investigated here for relevant laser parameters accessible in near future. It is demonstrated…
Dependence of the energy of ions accelerated during interaction of the laser pulse obliquelly incident on the thin foil target on the laser polarization is studied experimentally and theoretically. We found that the ion energy being maximal…
We present a new acceleration scheme capable of accelerating electrons and ions in an underdense plasma. Transversely Pumped Acceleration (TPA) uses multiple arrays of counter-propagating laser beamlets that focus onto a central…
The proposed linear accelerator ("scanator") consists of a terawatt table-top laser and a set of passive elements - beam splitters, dispersion elements for stretching of the laser pulse and chirping of the splitted beams, and dispersion…
In the past two decades, laser-accelerated ion sources and their applications have been intensely researched. Recently, it has been shown through experiments that proton beams with characteristics comparable to those obtained with solid…
Laser pulses of extreme intensities ($I>10^{22}~ \mathrm{W/cm^2}$) are about to become available in the laboratory. The prepulse of such a laser can induce a plasma expansion that generates a low-density channel in near-critical gas jets.…
In the present paper we introduce a new accelerator concept for ions. The accelerator is nano-structured and can consist of a range of materials. It is capable of generating large ionic currents at moderate ion energies. The nano-structures…
An overview of research on laser-plasma based acceleration of ions is given. The experimental state of the art is summarized and recent progress is discussed. The basic acceleration processes are briefly reviewed with an outlook on hybrid…
Accelerating particles to relativistic energies over very short distances using lasers has been a long standing goal in physics. Among the various schemes proposed for electrons, vacuum laser acceleration has attracted considerable interest…
Multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations are used to study the generation of electrostatic shocks in plasma and the reflection of background ions to produce high-quality and high-energy ion beams. Electrostatic shocks are driven by…