Abstract
Recent progress in generating high-energy (>50 MeV) protons from intense laser–matter interactions (1018–1021 W cm−2; refs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) has opened up new areas of research, with applications in radiography8, oncology9, astrophysics10, medical imaging11, high-energy-density physics12,13,14, and ion-proton beam fast ignition15,16,17,18,19. With the discovery of proton focusing with curved surfaces20,21, rapid advances in these areas will be driven by improved focusing technologies. Here we report on the first investigation of the generation and focusing of a proton beam using a cone-shaped target. We clearly show that the focusing is strongly affected by the electric fields in the beam in both open and enclosed (cone) geometries, bending the trajectories near the axis. Also in the cone geometry, a sheath electric field effectively ‘channels’ the proton beam through the cone tip, substantially improving the beam focusing properties. These results agree well with particle simulations and provide the physics basis for many future applications.
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Acknowledgements
The authors sincerely thank P. Norreys for helpful discussions concerning this work and gratefully acknowledge the support of the staff at the TRIDENT laser facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory. We would also like to thank T. Yabuuchi for useful discussions. T.B. is supported through the Lawrence Scholar Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This work was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-SC0001265. M.R., A.O. and D.K. are supported by the BMBF 06DA9044I.
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F.N.B., M.E.F., P.K.P., R.B.S., M.H.K., H.S.M., E.M.G. M.S.W. and T.B. were involved in the project planning and target design. T.B., K.A.F., D.T.O., S.A.G., L.C.J., D.P.H., D.C.G., A.O., D.K. and M.R. contributed to the experimental work. T.B. and C.B. carried out the data analysis and wrote the letter along with F.N.B. and M.E.F., where M.E.F. performed the simulations.
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Bartal, T., Foord, M., Bellei, C. et al. Focusing of short-pulse high-intensity laser-accelerated proton beams. Nature Phys 8, 139–142 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2153
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2153
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