Laser acceleration of ion beams

Laser Acceleration and Laser Cooling for Ion Beams

Cooling and acceleration of ions by lasers has gained increasing attention over the last years. The common interest is to further increase the luminosity of ion beams, either by shrinking the phase space occupied by the beam, or simply via increasing the number of particles. Recently, laser cooling has demonstrated ion beam crystallization as the ultimate reduction of the beam temperature. On t...

Laser-driven shock acceleration of monoenergetic ion beams.

We show that monoenergetic ion beams can be accelerated by moderate Mach number collisionless, electrostatic shocks propagating in a long scale-length exponentially decaying plasma profile. Strong plasma heating and density steepening produced by an intense laser pulse near the critical density can launch such shocks that propagate in the extended plasma at high velocities. The generation of a ...

Radiation-pressure acceleration of ion beams driven by circularly polarized laser pulses.

We present experimental studies on ion acceleration from ultrathin diamondlike carbon foils irradiated by ultrahigh contrast laser pulses of energy 0.7 J focused to peak intensities of 5x10(19) W/cm2. A reduction in electron heating is observed when the laser polarization is changed from linear to circular, leading to a pronounced peak in the fully ionized carbon spectrum at the optimum foil th...

Laser cooling of relativistic ion beams

M. Bussmann1, W. Wen1,2,3, D.F.A. Winters2,4, U. Schramm1, W. Nörtershäuser2,5, C. Novotny2,5, C. Geppert2,5, Th. Walther6, G. Birkl6, Th. Kühl2, C. Kozhuharov2, M. Steck2, F. Nolden2, C. Dimopoulou2, X. Ma3, and Th. Stöhlker2,4 1Forschunsgzentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, D-01328 Dresden, Germany; 2GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH, D-64291 Darmstadt, Germany; 3Institute for Modern ...

Generation of heavy ion beams using femtosecond laser pulses in the target normal sheath acceleration and radiation pressure acceleration regimes