Related papers: Ion Acceleration in Laser Generated Mega Tesla Mag…
The interaction of ultraintense laser pulses with solids is largely affected by the plasma gradient at the vacuum-solid interface, which modifies the absorption and ultimately, controls the energy distribution function of heated electrons.…
We present experimental results of vacuum laser acceleration (VLA) of electrons using radially polarized laser pulses interacting with a plasma mirror. Tightly focused radially polarized laser pulses have been proposed for electron…
Compared with conventional accelerators, laser plasma accelerators can generate high energy ions at a greatly reduced scale, due to their TV/m acceleration gradient. A compact laser plasma accelerator (CLAPA) has been built at the Institute…
The Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) in Garching near Munich features the ATLAS 3000 laser system, which can deliver up to 3\,PW within a pulse length of 20\,fs. It is the driver for the Laser-driven ION (LION) beamline, which…
The process of radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) of ions is investigated with the aim of suppressing the Rayleigh-Taylor like transverse instabilities in laser-foil interaction. This is achieved by imposing surface and density…
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…
The interaction of micro- and nano-structured target surfaces with high-power laser pulses is being widely investigated for its unprecedented absorption efficiency. We have developed vertically aligned metallic micro-pillar arrays for…
A kinetic model for the shock acceleration of ions in laser-produced plasmas is developed. A fraction of the warm ions are accelerated by the large amplitude monotonic potential of the double layer created due the plasma compression and…
Quasi-monoenergetic GeV-scale protons are predicted to efficiently generate via radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) when the foil thickness is matched with the laser intensity, e.g., $L_{mat}$ at several nm to 100 nm with $10^{19}-10^{22}…
The interaction of ultrashort, high intensity laser pulses with thin foil targets leads to ion acceleration on the target rear surface. To make this ion source useful for applications, it is important to optimize the transfer of energy from…
We propose a scheme to overcome the great challenge of polarization loss in spin-polarized ion acceleration. When a petawatt laser pulse penetrates through a compound plasma target consisting of a double layer slab and prepolarized hydrogen…
Laser-solid interaction can lead to the acceleration of protons to tens of MeV. Here, we show that a strong enhancement of this acceleration can be achieved by splitting the laser pulse to two parts of equal energy and opposite incidence…
Laser pulses of extreme intensities ($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.…
Magnetized collisionless shocks drive particle acceleration broadly in space and astrophysics. We perform the first large-scale particle-in-cell simulations with realistic laboratory parameters (density, temperature, and velocity) to…
Laser-driven ions have compelling properties and their potential use for medical applications has attracted a huge global interest. One of the major challenges of these applications is generating beams of the required energies. To date,…
The accelerating gradients in conventional linear accelerators are currently limited to 100 MV per meter. Plasma-based accelerators have the ability to sustain accelerating gradients which are several orders of magnitude greater than that…
We report on the first results of laser plasma wakefield acceleration driven by ultrashort mid-infrared laser pulses (\lambda= 3.9 \mu m, 100 fs, 0.25 TW), which enable near- and above-critical density interactions with moderate-density gas…
Direct Laser Acceleration (DLA) of electrons during a high-energy, picosecond laser interaction with an underdense plasma has been demonstrated to be substantially enhanced by controlling the laser focusing geometry. Experiments using the…
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…
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…