An ultra-short and TeV quasi-monoenergetic ion beam generation by laser wakefield accelerator in the snowplow regime

¹ Graduate School, China Academy of Engineering Physics - P.O. Box 8009, Beijing 100088, China
² Center for Applied Physics and Technology, Peking University - Beijing 100871, China
³ State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, Peking University - Beijing 100871, China
⁴ Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics - P.O. Box 8009, Beijing 100088, China

^a zhengfl_ccnu@yahoo.com.cn
^b X.Yan@pku.edu.cn
^c xthe@iapcm.ac.cn

Received: 8 April 2011
Accepted: 20 July 2011

Abstract

A new laser-plasma ion acceleration mechanism, snowplow ion acceleration, is proposed using an ultra-relativistically intense laser pulse irradiating on a combination target. When the thickness of the foil D is less than the length where the double-layer consisting of electron and ion layers is formed, the relativistic ion beam pre-accelerated by radiation pressure acceleration can be trapped and accelerated to the TeV level by the laser plasma wakefield over a long distance in the snowplow regime. Based on the classic wakefield theory, the snowplow structure can control the beam quality in terms of pulse duration, leading to the fact that the heavy-ion beam is theoretically shorter than half of the total wakefield structure, the size of the acceleration region. An analytical model is established, suggesting that ultra-short (70 μm) and ultra-highly energetic (3.2 TeV) carbon ion bunches generated by a centimeter-scale laser wakefield acceleration are expected, driven by a circularly polarized (CP) laser pulse with intensity of 10²³ W/cm² and duration of 66 fs. The particle-in-cell simulations agree well with theoretical results.