Related papers: Enhancing laser-driven proton acceleration by usin…
We discovered a simple regime where a near-critical plasma irradiated by a laser of experimentally available intensity can self-organize to produce positrons and accelerate them to ultra-relativistic energies. The laser pulse piles up…
We demonstrate laser-driven Helium ion acceleration with cut-off energies above 25 MeV and peaked ion number above $10^8$ /MeV for 22(2) MeV projectiles from near-critical density gas jet targets. We employed shock gas jet nozzles at the…
We study proton acceleration from a foil target with a transversely varying density using multi-dimensional Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations. In order to reduce electron heating and deformation of the target, circularly polarized Gaussian…
The physics governing electron acceleration by a relativistically intense laser are not confined to the critical density surface, they also pervade the sub-critical plasma in front of the target. Here, particles can gain many times the…
Active energy compression scheme is presently being investigated for future laser-plasma accelerators. This method enables generating laser-plasma accelerator electron beams with a small, $\sim 10^{-5}$, relative slice energy spread. When…
We briefly report on the recently proposed [G. Fiore, R. Fedele, U. de Angelis, Phys. Plasmas 21 (2014), 113105], [G. Fiore, S. De Nicola, arXiv:1509.04656] electron acceleration mechanism named "slingshot effect": under suitable conditions…
Magnetic Vortex Acceleration (MVA) from near critical density targets is one of the promising schemes of laser-driven ion acceleration. 3D particle-in-cell simulations are used to explore a more extensive laser-target parameter space than…
Laser-driven ion acceleration provides ultra-short, high-charge, low-emittance beams, which are desirable for a wide range of high-impact applications. Yet after decades of research, a significant increase in maximum ion energy is still…
Laser-plasma accelerators offer a compact means of producing high-energy electron beams, but their performance is fundamentally limited by dephasing between the accelerated electrons and the plasma wave. To overcome this limitation, we…
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…
A new regime is described for Radiation Pressure Acceleration of a thin foil by an intense laser beam of above 10^20 W/cm^2. Highly monoenergetic proton beams extending to GeV energies can be produced with very high efficiency using…
The development of ultra-intense laser-based sources of high energy ions is an important goal, with a variety of potential applications. One of the barriers to achieving this goal is the need to maximize the conversion efficiency from laser…
Although the interaction of a flat-foil with currently available laser intensities is now considered a routine process, during the last decade emphasis is given to targets with complex geometries aiming on increasing the ion energy. This…
In laser-plasma experiments, we observed that ion acceleration from the Coulomb explosion of the plasma channel bored by the laser, is prevented when multiple plasma instabilities such as filamentation and hosing, and nonlinear coherent…
A high repetition rate electron source was generated by tightly focusing kHz, few-mJ laser pulses into an underdense plasma. This high intensity laser-plasma interaction led to stable electron beams over several hours but with strikingly…
The dynamics of the acceleration of ultrathin foil targets by the radiation pressure of superintense, circularly polarized laser pulses is investigated by analytical modeling and particle-in-cell simulations. By addressing self-induced…
A two-phase model, where the plasma expansion is an isothermal one when laser irradiates and a following adiabatic one after laser ends, has been proposed to predict the maximum energy of the proton beams induced in the ultra-intense…
Hard x-ray emission (20 - 200 keV) from plasmas produced by intense laser pulses on nanoparticle coated targets is compared with that from optically polished targets. The yield enhancement offered by nanoparticles is studied under different…
Propagation of short and ultra-intense laser pulses in a semi-infinite space of overdense hydrogen plasma is analyzed via fully-relativistic, real geometry particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations including radiation friction. The relativistic…
Collision of laser-driven subrelativistic high density ion flows provides a way to create extremely compressed ion conglomerates and study their properties. This paper presents a theoretical study of the electrodynamic implosion of ions…