PW performance ion acceleration from the LANL 200TW Trident laser facility

The high contrast front-end for the 200 TW Trident laser has shown in recent experiments the importance roles that Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) and prepulse contrast play in laser-ion acceleration. Ion energies above 58 MeV with efficiencies of greater than 5% into ions above 4 MeV have been observed even at modest intensities, on par with the Nova Petawatt results2 at half the intensity1, and a fifth of the energy and power, at an intrinsic laser ASE contrast of ≫ 10−7. Scalings for, laser energy, intensity, and target thickness are presented and compared to other empirical scalings and theories, including results of the new ultra-high contrast ≫10−10 Optical Parametric Chirped-Pulse Amplification (OPCPA) front-end system3.