1. Optically tunable proton acceleration with a controlled prepulse in ultrashort intense laser double-foil target interaction.
- Author
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Wei, Wen-Qing, Zhang, Jia-Lin, Ge, Xu-Lei, Liu, Meng, Li, Bo-Yuan, Li, Jian-Xing, Zhao, Yong-Tao, and Yuan, Xiao-Hui
- Subjects
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ULTRASHORT laser pulses , *PROTON beams , *PROTONS , *FEMTOSECOND lasers , *LASERS , *ANGULAR distance , *ULTRA-short pulsed lasers - Abstract
Competition and transition of the dominated mechanisms for proton acceleration were investigated in experiments by optically tuning the preplasma density profile using an additional femtosecond pre-ablation laser beam. Two groups of proton beams with angular separation were measured along the laser propagation axis and target normal direction from a vacuum-gapped double-foil target. A transition of proton acceleration from a target normal sheath acceleration regime to relativistically induced transparency (RIT) domination was observed when increasing the prepulse intensity. Two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations qualitatively verify the experimental observations that a proton component along the laser axis is mainly generated by the RIT induced breakout afterburner from the tailored pre-expanded ultrathin front-layer foil with spatial-intensity distribution improvement by the second-layer foil. Our method can be popularized in manipulating the laser-driven proton acceleration and beam spatial quality for wide applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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