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It has been known for about sixty years that proton and heavy ion therapy is a very powerful radiation procedure for treating tumours. It has an innate ability to irradiate tumours with greater doses and spatial selectivity compared with electron and photon therapy and hence is a tissue sparing procedure. For more than twenty years powerful lasers have generated high energy beams of protons and heavy ions and hence it has been frequently speculated that lasers could be used as an alternative to RF accelerators to produce the particle beams necessary for cancer therapy. The present paper reviews the progress made towards laser driven hadron cancer therapy and what has still to be accomplished to realise its inherent enormous potential., Comment: 40 pages, 24 figures

It is shown that the energy of protons accelerated in laser-matter interaction experiments may be significantly increased through the process of splitting the incoming laser pulse into multiple interaction stages of equal intensity. From a thermodynamic point of view, the splitting procedure can be viewed as an effective way of increasing the efficiency of energy transfer from the laser light to protons, which peaks for processes having the least amount of entropy gain. It is predicted that it should be possible to achieve $\apprge 100%$ increase in the energy efficiency in a six-stage laser proton accelerator compared to a single laser-target interaction scheme.

It is shown that the transparency of opaque material with negative permittivity exhibits resonant behavior. The resonance occurs as a result of the excitation of the surface waves at slab boundaries. Dramatic field amplification of the incident evanescent fields at the resonance improves the resolution of the the sub-wavelength imaging system (superlens). A finite thickness slab can be totally transparent to a \textit{p}-polarized obliquely incident electromagnetic wave for certain values of the incidence angle and wave frequency corresponding to the excitation of the surface modes. At the resonance, two evanescent waves have a finite phase shift providing non-zero energy flux through the non-transparent region.

It is shown that an overcritical density plasma slab can be totally transparent to a \textit{p}-polarized obliquely incident electromagnetic wave. High transparency is achieved due to the interference of the evanescent waves in the subcritical region. The transmission coefficient has the resonant character due to the excitation of a plasma surface mode (plasmon-polariton). It is crucial that two evanescent waves have certain phase shift to provide non-zero energy flux through non-transparent region. The required phase shift is obtained at the exact resonance and corresponds to the absolute transparency. In a warm plasma case, the excitation of the propagating longitudinal (electrostatic) modes becomes possible. We demonstrate that these longitudinal excitations facilitate the total transparency of an opaque plasma slab creating additional resonances in the transmission property of the system.