Laser-driven collisionless shock acceleration of protons from gas jets tailored by one or two nanosecond beams

Bonvalet, J.; Loiseau, P.; Marquès, J. R.; Atukpor, E.; d’Humières, E.; Forestier-Colleoni, P.; Hannachi, F.; Lancia, L.; Raffestin, D.; Tarisien, M.; Tikhonchuk, V. T.; Nicolaï, Ph.

doi:10.1063/5.0062503

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Promising results were also obtained earlier by Haberberger et al (2012) with a train of pulses sent to a near-critical density target with the same laser wavelength. More recently another scheme was discussed in the 1 µm laser wavelength regime with tailored laser pulses propagating transversely to the driving laser pulse (Bonvalet et al 2021;Marquès et al 2021). In this scheme the two laser pulses will drive blast waves in front and behind the gas target (with respect to the main laser propagation axis) that will heat and compress the initial density profile to form a sharp gradient, thin plasma slab.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Proton acceleration from optically tailored high-density gas jet targets

Maitrallain,

Marquès,

Bontemps

et al. 2024

J. Plasma Phys.

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Laser-driven ion acceleration is well established using solid targets mainly in the target normal sheath acceleration regime. To follow the increasing repetition rate available on high-intensity lasers, the use of high-density gas targets has been explored in the past decade. When interacting with targets reaching densities close to the critical one, the laser pulse can trigger different acceleration mechanisms such as Collisionless Shock Acceleration (CSA) or hole boring. Particle-in-cell simulations using ideal target profiles show that CSA can accelerate a collimated, narrow energy spread and few hundreds of megaelectronvolts ion beam on the laser axis. Nevertheless, in real experiments, the laser will not only interact with an overcritical, thin plasma slab with sharp density gradients, but also with lower density regions surrounding the core of the gas jet, extending to several hundreds of micrometres. The interaction of the laser with these lower density wings will lead to nonlinear effects that will reduce the available energy to drive the shock in the high-density region of the target. Optically tailoring this target could mitigate that issue. Recent experiments conducted on different laser facilities aimed at testing several tailoring configurations. We first tested a scheme with a copropagating picosecond prepulse to create a lower density plasma channel to facilitate the propagation of the main pulse, while the second one was a transverse tailoring driven by nanosecond laser pulses to generate blast waves and form a high-density plasma slab. The main results will be presented here and the methods compared.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently another scheme was discussed in the 1 m laser wavelength regime with tailored laser pulses propagating transversely to the driving laser pulse (Bonvalet et al. 2021; Marquès et al. 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proton acceleration from optically tailored high-density gas jet targets

Maitrallain,

Marquès,

Bontemps

et al. 2024

J. Plasma Phys.

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“…But their use as proton sources is still challenging since extremely high densities are demanded. In this regime, the dominant acceleration mechanisms are the Magnetic Vortex Acceleration (MVA) 19 – 27 , the Collisionless Shock Acceleration (CSA) 28 – 30 and the Coulomb Explosion (CE) from atomic clusters 31 , 32 . Protons and ions have been experimentally accelerated in the past in gaseous targets, up to 20 MeV per nucleon by high energy, ns pulse duration, CO 2 lasers at “single shot” experiments 33 , 34 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Magnetic Vortex Acceleration by femtosecond laser interaction with long living optically shaped gas targets in the near critical density plasma regime

Tazes,

Passalidis,

Kaselouris

et al. 2024

Sci Rep

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We introduce a novel, gaseous target optical shaping laser set-up, capable to generate short scale length, near-critical target profiles via generated colliding blast waves. These profiles are capable to maintain their compressed density for several nanoseconds, being therefore ideal for laser-plasma particle acceleration experiments in the near critical density plasma regime. Our proposed method overcomes the laser-target synchronization limitations and delivers energetic protons, during the temporal evolution of the optically shaped profile, in a time window of approximately 2.5 ns. The optical shaping of the gas-jet profiles is optimised by MagnetoHydroDynamic simulations. 3D Particle-In-Cell models, adopting the spatiotemporal profile, simulate the 45 TW femtosecond laser plasma interaction to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed proton acceleration set-up. The optical shaping of gas-jets is performed by multiple, nanosecond laser pulse generated blastwaves. This process results in steep gradient, short scale length plasma profiles, in the near critical density regime allowing operation at high repetition rates. Notably, the Magnetic Vortex Acceleration mechanism exhibits high efficiency in coupling the laser energy into the plasma in the optically shaped targets, resulting to collimated proton beams of energies up to 14 MeV.

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“…In this paper we study the plasma density profile optical shaping of a long density scale length, high-pressure, gas-jet via multiple hydrodynamic, Sedov-type blast waves (BWs) to generate near-critical, steep density gradient, gas target profiles, optimized for proton acceleration [17,18,[27][28][29] . The generation and evolution of the BWs are simulated by the 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code, FLASH [30] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A computational study on the optical shaping of gas targets via blast wave collisions for magnetic vortex acceleration

Tazes

Passalidis

Kaselouris

et al. 2022

High Pow Laser Sci Eng

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This research work emphasises on the capability of delivering optically shaped targets through the interaction of nanosecond laser pulses with high-density gas-jet profiles, demanded to explore the proton acceleration in the near-critical density regime, via the Magnetic Vortex Acceleration (MVA). Multiple BlastWaves (BWs) are generated by laser pulses that compress the gas-jet into near-critical steep gradient slabs of a few microns thickness. Geometrical alternatives for delivering the laser pulses into the gas target are explored to efficiently control the characteristics of the density profile. The generated BWs shock front collisions are computationally studied by three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations. The efficiency of the proposed target shaping method for MVA is demonstrated for TW-class lasers by a Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulation.

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Laser-driven collisionless shock acceleration of protons from gas jets tailored by one or two nanosecond beams

Cited by 7 publications

References 40 publications

Proton acceleration from optically tailored high-density gas jet targets

Proton acceleration from optically tailored high-density gas jet targets

Efficient Magnetic Vortex Acceleration by femtosecond laser interaction with long living optically shaped gas targets in the near critical density plasma regime

A computational study on the optical shaping of gas targets via blast wave collisions for magnetic vortex acceleration

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