Efficient energetic proton generation driven by ultrashort ultraintense Ti:sapphire laser pulse

Abstract

Significant progress on laser driven proton generation has been made in the past few years. Proton acceleration driven by ultrashort ultraintense laser pulse has been a promising technology for realizing a compact accelerator. Laser driven protons have several unique properties, such as shot pulse duration of ∼ps, high peak current in kA range, low transverse emittance below 10-2mm mrad, and good laminarity. For practical applications, the proton beam should be optimized to obtain higher energy, narrower energy spread, larger number and conversion efficiency. Maximum proton energy of 58 MeV has been demonstrated using PW class laser pulse, and quasi monoenergetic protons were produced from microstructured target. We have performed series of experiments to generate energetic proton beam by collaborating with JAEA and CRIEPI groups. Energetic protons were produced by the interaction of ultrashort ultraintense laser pulse with thin solid targets. Laser pulse with maximum energy of 1.7 J and minimum pulse duration of 34 FS, giving maximum peak intensity 3x1019W/cm2, was focused using an off axis parabolic mirror at 45 degree incident angle with p polarization. The target used was one of 5μm thick copper of 7.5, 12.5, 25μm thick polyimide foils. Fresh Surface of target was supplied by moving the target with tape target driver for every laser shot, performing repetitive laser shooting without breaking vacuum. In order to investigate optimal generation conditions, we varied the laser pulse width and changed target position with respect to a tight focus position of laser beam. Main proton diagnostic was proton time of flight spectrometer to facilitate real time optimization of the laser and target conditions. Energetic protons with maximum energy of up to 4 MeV are generated by the interaction of laser pulse with a 7.5μm thick Polyimide target. The conversion efficiency from the laser energy into the proton kinetic energies is achieved to be about 3%. Our result shows that the contrast of ASE plays one of the key issues for the efficient proton generation and that the polyimide target which is transparent to 800nm laser pulse might have some role for the efficient proton generation. Proton energy spectrum also shows a narrow band structure having a small energy spread with about 7% of its absolute value near 1.9 MeV