Related papers: Automated control and optimisation of laser driven…
Tuning machine parameters of particle accelerators is a repetitive and time-consuming task that is challenging to automate. While many off-the-shelf optimization algorithms are available, in practice their use is limited because most…
The radiation pressure acceleration regime of laser ion acceleration requires high intensity laser pulses to function efficiently. Moreover the foil should be opaque for incident radiation during the interaction to ensure maximum momentum…
Proton therapy is a modality in fast development. Characterized by a maximum dose deposition at the end of the proton trajectory followed by a sharp fall-off, proton beams can deliver a highly conformal dose to the tumor while sparing…
The recent advent of deep artificial neural networks has resulted in a dramatic increase in performance for object classification and detection. While pre-trained with everyday objects, we find that a state-of-the-art object detection…
The energy of the ions accelerated by an intense electromagnetic wave in the radiation pressure dominated regime can be greatly enhanced due to a transverse expansion of a thin target. The expansion decreases the number of accelerated ions…
High-harmonic generation is one of the most extreme nonlinear-optical processes observed to date. By focusing an intense laser pulse into a gas, the light-atom interaction that occurs during the process of ionising the atoms results in the…
Heating and ionization are among the most fundamental processes in relativistic laser--solid interactions; however, their spatiotemporal evolution remains challenging to capture experimentally. Here we present detailed diagnosis of…
Direct laser acceleration has proven to be an efficient source of high-charge electron bunches and high brilliance X-rays. However, an analytical description of the acceleration in the interaction with varying plasma density targets is…
The laser interaction with an electron-positron-ion mixed plasma is studied, from the perspective of the associated high-order harmonic generation. For an idealized mixed plasma which is assumed with a sharp plasma-vacuum interface and…
Relativistic spin-polarized electron beams are important for fundamental research and the industry, but their generation currently requires conventional accelerators or ultrastrong laser facilities, limiting their accessibility and broad…
Laser wakefield acceleration can generate a femtosecond-scale broadband X-ray betatron radiation pulse from electrons accelerated by an intense laser pulse in a plasma. The micrometer-scale of the source makes wakefield betatron radiation…
To this day the interaction of high-intensity lasers with matter is considered to be a possible candidate for next generation particle accelerators. Within the LIGHT collaboration crucial work for the merging of a high-intensity laser…
The interaction of high intensity laser radiation with mass-limited target exhibits significant enhancement of the ion acceleration when the target is surrounded by an underdense plasma corona, as seen in numerical simulations. The…
The field of laser-matter interaction traditionally deals with the response of atoms, molecules and plasmas to an external light wave. However, the recent sustained technological progress is opening up the possibility of employing intense…
Using two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we examine how an externally applied strong magnetic impacts proton acceleration in laser-irradiated solid-density targets. We find that a kT-level external magnetic field can sufficiently…
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…
As one of the leading acceleration mechanisms in laser-driven underdense plasmas, direct laser acceleration (DLA) is capable of producing high-energy-density electron beams in a plasma channel for many applications. However, the mechanism…
Proton beams with up to 100 pC bunch charge, 0.48 MeV cut-off energy and divergence as low as a $3^{\circ}$ were generated from solid targets at kHz repetition rate by a few-mJ femtosecond laser under controlled plasma conditions. The beam…
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…
We propose a novel scheme for controlling the injection of a high-quality electron bunch into a channel-guided laser plasma accelerator. This all-optical technique, constricted waveguide injection, creates a highly tunable controlled…