Laser-driven collisionless shock accelerated ion beams (Final Report)
- Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
The major goal of the project was to study laser-driven collisionless shock ion acceleration.This acceleration mechanism has been demonstrated using CO2 lasers, but the current state of the art CO2 lasers cannot access peak normalized vector potentials of much greater than $$a_0$$ ~ 2. Therefore the favorable scalings of ion energies with $$a_0$$ observed using numerical modeling cannot be tested experimentally with these systems. Therefore this project is to develop an experimental platform to investigate laser-driven shock ion acceleration using 1.053 µm lasers, which can access extremely relativistic conditions, $$a_0$$ > 20. A near-critical cluster jet target was developed for studying this regime and the target was characterized under a number of conditions. This included a cooled cluster regime where a knife edge was used to achieve front-side scale lengths of < 60 µm. The experimental Tcubed facility was used to perform experiments and successfully measured accelerated protons in a narrow divergence beam. Particle-in-cell simulations have been performed to show shocks capable of ion acceleration can be produced. In contrast to the "ideal'' target scalelength profile described by Fiuza et al., where the electrons are strongly heated in a localized region near peak density, we show electron heating within the underdense region is rapid enough to enable collisionless shock formation. This is potentially good news for future experiments since it relaxes the strict, and difficult to assemble target requirements.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Fusion Energy Sciences (FES)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0012327
- OSTI ID:
- 1512289
- Report Number(s):
- DE-SC0012327_finalreport_2018
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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