The influence of target material and thickness on proton energy and angular distribution

Absorption of ultrashort intense lasers in laser–solid interactions

“…[24] Such sub-wavelength grating-surface targets can be used to increase the conversion efficiency in laser-driven plasmabased proton acceleration due to the extremely high absorption coefficient of the incident laser energy. Proton accelerations due to the laser-solid target interaction have attracted a lot of interest, [3,77,78] not only because such a novel acceleration concept can provide a much higher acceleration gradient compared to that of the conventional accelerators, but also the produced proton beams have a much shorter pulse duration as well as a much lower transverse emittance. Therefore, such proton beams have various potential applications, such as proton cancer therapy [76] and proton imaging.…”