Ultrashort-laser-produced heavy ion generation via target laser-ablation cleaning

It has become apparent in the last few years that the surface contamination on laser-acceleration targets is a major impediment to the acceleration of the actual target ions. To this end we have performed experiments at the Los Alamos Trident Laser facility using one arm of the Trident laser at 150 ps to ablatively clean targets that are subsequently irradiated by the Trident TW Short-pulse arm to accelerate the bulk target ions to high energies. The 150 ps ablation pulse rids the rear of the target of its omnipresent surface contamination layer allowing the short-pulse to illuminate the target and accelerate ions via the Target Normal Sheath Acceleration (TNSA) mechanism. Our experimental results are compared to the LASNEX code to validate and improve our predictive capabilities for future acceleration experiments.