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Hegelich, B.M.

Paper Title Page
FR-05 Towards GeV Laser-Driven Ion Acceleration  
 
  • B.M. Hegelich
    LMU, München
 
 

Par­ti­cle ac­cel­er­a­tion with high power lasers has been demon­strat­ed by var­i­ous mech­a­nisms, ac­cel­er­at­ing elec­trons to GeV en­er­gies. So far, ion en­er­gies were stuck in the MeV range un­less one could reach in­ten­si­ties ≥ 1024 W/cm2. These pa­ram­e­ters are dis­cour­ag­ing for ad­vanced ac­cel­er­a­tor con­cepts and un­ac­cept­able for ap­pli­ca­tions like Ion-driv­en Fast Ig­ni­tion (IFI) or hadron ther­a­py. The re­al­iza­tion of ul­tra­high con­trast lasers and free stand­ing nm-thin laser tar­gets how­ev­er marks a paradigm shift. The com­bi­na­tion of these two tech­niques en­ables a num­ber of new ion ac­cel­er­a­tion mech­a­nisms that have been ob­served in sim­u­la­tions and promise GeV ion en­er­gies. Ex­am­ples are the Break-Out Af­ter­burn­er (BOA) ac­cel­er­a­tion and the Phase-Sta­ble Ac­cel­er­a­tion (PSA) regime, also re­port­ed as Ra­di­a­tion Pres­sure Ac­cel­er­a­tion (RPA). Here we pre­sent the first ex­per­i­men­tal re­al­iza­tion of the BOA ac­cel­er­a­tion mech­a­nism, achiev­ing 0.5 GeV car­bon ions out of a sin­gle laser ac­cel­er­a­tion stage at the Los Alam­os Tri­dent laser. Full 3D-PIC sim­u­la­tions at full solid den­si­ty con­firm ear­li­er 1- and 2D re­sults, and are in good agree­ment with the ex­per­i­men­tal data. More­over, hav­ing been per­formed be­fore the ex­per­i­ment, they ex­hib­it ex­traor­di­nary pre­dic­tive power. We will dis­cuss the re­quire­ments this poses on the drive lasers es­pe­cial­ly con­cern­ing the pulse con­trast and re­port first ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults in re­al­iz­ing those con­di­tions and how to scale to fu­ture lasers.

 

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