Description
Plasma-based particle accelerators offer the prospect of drastically reducing the size and cost of accelerator facilities, improving accessibility while providing a promising route toward next-generation machines at the energy frontier. Because plasmas are already ionized (consisting of free electrons and ions) they can sustain accelerating fields several orders of magnitude higher than those achievable in conventional solid-state radio-frequency structures. This makes plasma accelerators particularly attractive for the development of compact and tunable ion sources. In this context, proton and ion beams are of special interest due to their highly localized energy deposition (Bragg peak), which underpins proton therapy and other applications requiring precise dose delivery. A promising approach to achieving such compact sources is laser-driven ion acceleration from solid-density targets.
In this work, we investigate radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) in overdense plasmas, where an intense laser pulse transfers its momentum to the target through a charge-separation layer driven by radiation pressure. We investigate the light-sail regime of RPA using 1D, fully relativistic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations performed with the OSIRIS PIC code. The simulations resolve the main stages of the interaction: target compression, formation of the charge-separation field, coherent acceleration of a dense ion bunch, and its subsequent evolution. By confronting analytical predictions with numerical results, we show that the fundamental physics of RPA is accurately captured within the kinetic PIC description.
| Field of Research/Work | Plasma and Solar Physics, Accelerators and Beams |
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