4th European Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop

Plasma Gratings as a Novel Target for Ion Acceleration

19 Sept 2019, 18:00

20m

SBIO (Hotel Biodola)

talk WG2 - Ion beams from plasmas WG2

Speaker

Oliver Ettlinger (Imperial College London)

Description

With the trend towards higher repetition rate laser systems for applications, there is a demand for new, high repetition rate target solutions. This talk will look at efforts to develop shaped, thin, near-critical density gas targets for radiation pressure driven ion acceleration experiments using the high power, $10.6\mu m$ ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ laser at Brookhaven National Laboratory. By suitably shaping a gas target, a ps laser pulse was used to first form a transient plasma grating structure in an underdense density ramp. Subsequently, protons were accelerated from the near-critical density plasma grating elements to multi-MeV energies, with few percent energy spreads with modest $\sim {10}^{15}{\mathrm{Wcm}}^{-2}$ laser intensities. The measured proton energies were more than twice that predicted by the hole-boring scaling, $E_i=4I/n_{c}c$. Multiple spectral features were observed on a significant fraction of shots. These results will be discussed, along with some future directions.

Presentation materials

EAAC2019.pdf