Title:	High-intensity-laser driven ion acceleration with ultra-thin targets
DNr:	NAISS 2023/22-8
Project Type:	NAISS Small Compute
Principal Investigator:	Shikha Bhadoria <shikha.bhadoria@physics.gu.se>
Affiliation:	Göteborgs universitet
Duration:	2023-01-05 – 2024-02-01
Classification:	10303
Keywords:

Abstract

Accelerated ion beams have a plethora of applications ranging from heavy-ion fusion to hadron-therapy for cancer treatment. Laser-driven ion acceleration offers the possibility of having alternate accelerators that are smaller and more affordable as opposed to the conventional linacs, cyclotrons and synchrotron. Experimental demonstration of such ion beams has already been achieved with several identified mechanisms, yet highest gained energy is still less than 100 MeV/u. With the advent of ultra-high intensity lasers such as the ELI (Europe), CoRels (S. Korea), Apollon (France) etc, many Quantum Electrodynamic effects begin to significantly affect the plasma dynamics when the laser's electric field gets closer to the critical Schwinger field. Ion acceleration in such scenarios with ultra-thin plasma target was recently explored using 2D simulations[1]. With this Small-Compute budget, I intend to further optimize the ion energies in such extreme-field-regime with higher dimensional simulations. [1] S. Bhadoria, Mattias Marklund, Christoph H. Keitel, "Energy enhancement of laser-driven ions by radiation reaction and Breit-Wheeler pair production in the ultra-relativistic Breakout-Afterburner regime", Arxiv.org/abs/2209.00267 (2022)