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Using a laser plasma accelerator, experiments with a 80 TW and 30 fs laser pulse demonstrated quasi-monoenergetic electron spectra with maximum energy over 0.4 GeV. This is achieved using a supersonic He gas jet and a sharp density ramp generated by a high intensity laser crossing pre-pulse focused 3 ns before the main laser pulse. By adjusting this crossing pre-pulse position inside the gas jet, among the laser shots with electron injection, more than 40% can produce quasi-monoenergetic spectra. This could become a relatively straight forward technique to control laser wakefield electron beams parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A study of isochoric heating of Al foil by laser-accelerated proton beam is presented, coupling self-consistent hydrodynamic simulations (including proton stopping) with experimental measurements. The proton source that induces the heating has been characterized experimentally and the induced heating has been inferred through critical density expansion velocity measurement. The low-energy part of the proton spectrum that plays the dominant part in the heating process has been studied in detail. The experimental results are compared with the results of 1-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations that use as input the measured proton source and good agreement between the two is found using the SESAME EOS. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Quasimonoenergetic electron beams with maximum energy >0.5 GeV and 2 mrad divergence have been generated in pure nitrogen gas via wakefield acceleration with 80 TW, 30 fs laser pulses. Long low energy tail features were typically observed due to continuous ionization injection. The measured peak electron energy decreased with the plasma density, agreeing with the predicted scaling for electrons. The experiments showed a threshold electron density of 3×1018cm-3 for self-trapping. Our experiments suggest that pure Nitrogen is a potential candidate gas to achieve GeV monoenergetic electrons using the ionization induced injection scheme for laser wakefield acceleration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]