Related papers: Synchronized ion acceleration by ultraintense slow…
For sufficiently short relativistic-intensity laser pulses, the disparity in time scales for electron and ion motion causes ions to behave as a fixed, neutralizing background. As the pulse duration or intensity is increased, ion motion…
Efficient coupling of intense laser pulses to solid-density matter is critical to many applications including ion acceleration for cancer therapy. At relativistic intensities, the focus has been mainly on investigating various laser beams…
The production of energetic (multi-GeV) heavy ion beams by acceleration of ultra-thin foils through the application of radiation pressure to a self-generated, imperfect plasma mirror (photon absorption probability {\eta} finite) is studied.…
In laser-solid interactions, electrons may be generated and subsequently accelerated to energies of the order-of-magnitude of the ponderomotive limit, with the underlying process dominated by direct laser acceleration. Breaking this limit,…
We review recent PIC simulation results which show that double-sided irradiaton of a thin overdense plasma slab by ultra-intense laser pulses from both sides can lead to sustained comoving acceleration of surface electrons to energies much…
Experimental results, supported by precise modelling, demonstrate optimisation of a plasma-based injector with intermediate laser pulse energy ($<1$ J), corresponding to a normalised vector potential $a_0 = 2.15$, using ionisation injection…
A novel efficient scheme of acceleration and collimation of dense plasma is proposed and examined. In the proposed scheme, a target placed in a cavity at the entrance of a guiding channel is irradiated by a laser beam introduced into the…
Fast ignition is an alternative concept of laser fusion in which the task of compressing the fusion pellet to supersolid densities is accomplished by the conventional high energy nanosecond glass lasers and the task of igniting the…
The nonlinear optical properties of a plasma due to the relativistic electron motion in an intense laser field are of fundamental importance for current research and the generation of brilliant laser-driven sources of particles and…
We show that when a solid plasma foil with a density gradient on the front surface is irradiated by an intense laser pulse at a grazing angle, around 80 degrees, a relativistic electron vortex is excited in the near-critical-density layer…
Compact, stable, and versatile laser-driven ion sources hold great promise for applications ranging from medicine to materials science and fundamental physics. While single-shot sources have demonstrated favorable beam properties, including…
Ionization is a fundamental process in intense laser-matter interactions, and is known to cause plasma defocusing and intensity clamping. Here, we investigate theoretically the propagation dynamics of an intense laser pulse in a helium gas…
Advances in ultra-intense laser technology are enabling, for the first time, relativistic intensities at mid-infrared (mid-IR) wavelengths. Anticipating further experimental research in this domain, we present high-resolution two…
We theoretically investigate high energy, collimated proton beam with three dimensional particle in cell simulations of ultrashort petawatt laser interaction with cryogenic hydrogen target of various shapes. Here we show that under…
Using multi-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations we study ion acceleration from a foil irradiated by a circularly polarized laser pulse at 1022W/cm^2 intensity. When the foil is shaped initially in the transverse direction to…
We present a parametric study based on 1-D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations conducted with the objective of understanding the interaction of intense lasers with near-critical non-uniform density gas targets. Specifically, we aim to find…
A target composition scheme to optimize the combined proton acceleration regime is presented and verified by two-dimensional particle-in-cell (2D PIC) simulations by using an ultra-intense circularly-polarized (CP) laser pulse irradiating…
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…
A new laser-proton acceleration structure combined by two relativistic electron shells, a suprathermal electron shell and a thermal electron cloud is proposed for $a\gtrapprox80\sigma_0$, where a is the normalized laser field and $\sigma_0$…