Surface plasmon-driven electron and proton acceleration without grating coupling

Year: 2022

Authors: Sarma J., McIlvenny A., Das N., Borghesi M., Macchi A.,

Autors Affiliation: Centre for Plasma Physics, The Queen´s University of Belfast, University Road BT71NN, Belfast, United Kingdom; Tezpur University, Assam, India; National Institute of Optics, National Research Council (CNR/INO), Adriano Gozzini Laboratory, Pisa, Italy; Enrico Fermi Department of Physics, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

Abstract: Surface plasmon (SP) excitation in intense laser interaction with solid target can be exploited for enhancing secondary emissions, in particular efficient acceleration of high charge electron bunches. Previous studies have mostly used grating coupling to allow SP excitation, which requires stringent laser contrast conditions to preserve the structural integrity of the target. Here we show via simulations that efficient SP electron acceleration for currently available short pulse lasers can occur in a flat foil irradiated at parallel or grazing incidence ($\sim 5{}^{\circ}$ with the target surface) without a surface modulation. In turn, the accelerated electrons can be effective for generating proton beams with narrow spectra peaked at $ > $100 MeV energies for currently available laser drivers.

Journal/Review: NEW JOURNAL OF PHYSICS

Volume: 24 (7)      Pages from: 073023-1  to: 073023-11

More Information: This work was supported by EPSRC (Grant EP/P010059/1), and The Ministry of Education, Govt. of India (through University Grants Commission, India) under the collaboration between Tezpur University, Assam, India and Queens University Belfast, UK. The EPOCH code was also funded by EPSRC (Grants EP/G054950/1, EP/G056803/1, EP/G055165/1 and EP/M022463/1). We are grateful for use of the computing resources from the Northern Ireland High Performance Computing (NI-HPC) service funded by EPSRC (EP/T022175).
KeyWords: laser-plasma acceleration, surface plasma waves, electron acceleration, ion acceleration, plasma simulation
DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/ac7d6e