Related papers: Cost-Optimal Laser-Accelerated Lightsails

Laser-driven proton sources have long been developed with an eye on their potential for medical application to radiation therapy. These sources are compact, versatile, and show peculiar characteristics such as extreme instantaneous dose…

The electric solar wind sail is a novel propellantless space propulsion concept. According to numerical estimates, the electric solar wind sail can produce a large total impulse per propulsion system mass. Here we consider using a 0.5 N…

The compactness of laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is limited by its long focal length for high power lasers, e.g., more than 10 meters for 1-peatawatt (PW) laser pulse and up to hundreds of meters for 10-100 PW lasers. The long focal…

Projections for the earliest interstellar mission possibilities are calculated based on 27 years of data on historic energy trends, societal priorities, required mission energy, and the implications of the Incessant Obsolescence Postulate…

Laser wakefield accelerators promise to revolutionise many areas of accelerator science. However, one of the greatest challenges to their widespread adoption is the difficulty in control and optimisation of the accelerator outputs due to…

Table-top laser-plasma ion accelerators seldom achieve narrow energy spreads, and never without serious compromises in efficiency, particle yield, etc. Using massive computer simulations, we identify a self-organizing scheme that exploits…

Observations of the FR I radio galaxy Centaurus A in radio, X-ray and gamma-ray bands provide evidence for lepton acceleration up to several TeV and clues about hadron acceleration to tens of EeV. Synthesising the available observational…

The choice of the launch vehicle is an important consideration during the preliminary planning of interplanetary missions. The launch vehicle must be highly reliable, capable of imparting sufficient energy to the spacecraft to inject it on…

Advanced and novel accelerators (ANAs), driven a by laser pulse or a relativistic particle bunch, have made remarkable progress over the last decades. They accelerated electrons by 10GeV in 30cm (laser driven) and by 42GeV in 85cm (particle…

Guiding relativistically intense laser pulses in low-density plasmas enables extended acceleration lengths in laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs), allowing for the production of multi-GeV electron beams. Quantitative interpretation of such…

The interaction of petawatt ($10^{15}\ \mathrm{W}$) lasers with solid matter forms the basis for advanced scientific applications such as table-top particle accelerators, ultrafast imaging systems and laser fusion. Key metrics for these…

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…

Theoretical study of heavy ion acceleration from ultrathin (<200 nm) gold foils irradiated by a short pulse laser is presented. Using two dimensional particle-in-cell simulations the time history of the laser bullet is examined in order to…

Relativistic electron beams produced by intense lasers over short distances have important applications in high energy density physics and medical technologies. Vacuum laser acceleration with plasma mirrors injectors has garnered…

We present a novel laser based ion acceleration scheme, where a petawatt circularly polarized laser pulse is shot on an ultra-thin (nano-scale) double-layer target. Our scheme allows the production of high-quality light ion beams with both…

Recent years have seen spectacular progress in the development of innovative acceleration methods that are not based on traditional RF accelerating structures. These novel developments are at the interface of laser, plasma and accelerator…

Ultrathin lightsails propelled by laser radiation pressure to relativistic speeds are currently the most promising route for flyby-based exoplanet exploration. However, there has been a notable lack of experimental characterization of key…

The miniaturization of electronics, sensors and actuators has enabled the growing use of CubeSats and sub-20 kg spacecraft. Their reduced mass and volume has the potential to translate into significant reductions in required propellant and…

Many astronomers have speculated that the solar system contains undiscovered massive planets or a distant stellar companion. The acceleration of the solar system barycenter can constrain the mass and position of the putative companion. In…

The sub-luminal phase velocity of electromagnetic waves in free space is generally unobtainable, being closely linked to forbidden faster than light group velocities. The requirement of effective sub-luminal phase-velocity in laser-driven…