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In this article, we report on the latest investigations and achievements in proton beam shaping with our laser-driven ion beamline at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH. This beamline was realized within the framework of the Laser Ion Generation, Handling, and Transport (LIGHT) collaboration to study the combination of laser-driven ion beams with conventional accelerator components. At its current state, the ions are accelerated by the high-power laser PHELIX via target normal sheath acceleration, and two pulsed high-magnetic solenoids are used for energy selection, transport, and transverse focusing. In between the two solenoids, there is a rf cavity that gives the LIGHT beamline the capability to longitudinally manipulate and temporally compress ion bunches to sub-nanosecond durations. To get optimal results, the rf cavity has to be synchronized with the PHELIX laser and therefore a reliable measurement of the temporal ion beam profile is necessary. In the past, these measurements showed unexpected correlations between the temporal beam profile and the phase as well as the electric field strength of the cavity. In this article, we present a numerical simulation of the beam transport through the LIGHT beamline which explains this behavior by a beam filamentation. We also report on our latest experimental campaigns, in which we combined transverse and longitudinal focusing for the first time. This led to proton bunches with a peak intensity of (3.28±0.24)×10^{8} protons/(ns mm^{2}) at a central energy of (7.72±0.14) MeV. The intensity refers to a circle with a diameter of (1.38±0.02) mm that encloses 50% of the protons in the focal spot at the end of the beamline. The temporal bunch width at this position was (742±40) ps (FWHM).

We report on our latest transverse focusing results of subnanosecond proton bunches achieved with a laser-driven multi-MeV ion beamline. In the frame of the LIGHT collaboration, a target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA) source based 6 m long beamline was installed. In the past years, the laser-driven proton beam was transported and shaped by this beamline. The particle beam is collimated with a pulsed high-field solenoid and rotated in longitudinal phase space with a radio-frequency cavity which leads to an energy compression with an energy spread of (2.7±1.7)% (ΔE/E_{0} at FWHM) or a time compression to the subnanosecond regime. Highest peak intensities in the subnanosecond regime open up an interesting field for several applications, e.g., proton imaging, as injectors in conventional accelerators or precise stopping power measurements in a plasma. We report on achieving highest peak intensities using an installed second solenoid as a final focusing system in our beamline to achieve small focal spot sizes. We measured a focal spot size of 1.1×1.2 mm leading to 5.8×10^{19} protons per s cm^{2} at a central energy bin of (9.55±0.25) MeV, which can be combined with a bunch duration below 500 ps at FWHM.

Blast-wave-driven hydrodynamic instabilities are studied in the presence of a background B-field through experiments and simulations in the high-energy-density (HED) physics regime. In experiments conducted at the Laboratoire pour l’utilisation des lasers intenses (LULI), a laser-driven shock-tube platform was used to generate a hydrodynamically unstable interface with a prescribed sinusoidal surface perturbation, and short-pulse x-ray radiography was used to characterize the instability growth with and without a 10-T B-field. The LULI experiments were modeled in FLASH using resistive and ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), and comparing the experiments and simulations suggests that the Spitzer model implemented in FLASH is necessary and sufficient for modeling these planar systems. These results suggest insufficient amplification of the seed B-field, due to resistive diffusion, to alter the hydrodynamic behavior. Although the ideal-MHD simulations did not represent the experiments accurately, they suggest that similar HED systems with dynamic plasma-β (=2μ0ρv2/B2) values of less than ∼100 can reduce the growth of blast-wave-driven Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities. These findings validate the resistive-MHD FLASH modeling that is being used to design future experiments for studying B-field effects in HED plasmas.