Proton acceleration from optically tailored high-density gas jet targets

Abstract

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.