Abstract
Ion acceleration in electrostatic collisionless shocks is driven by the interaction of the high-power laser with specially tailored near-relativistic critical density plasma. 2D EPOCH particle-in-cell simulations show that the ion acceleration is dependent on the target material used. In materials with low charge-to-mass ratio , proton beams with high flux and low energy spread are generated. In multi-ion plasmas the ions with different acquire different velocities under a non-oscillating component of electrostatic field in the upstream region. This relative drift between the protons () and the lower ions leads to the excitation of electrostatic ion two-stream instability. This in turn generates a low-velocity component in the upstream expanding protons. The velocity distribution of the upstream expanding protons is further broadened toward the higher velocity by the electrostatic ion two-stream instability between reflected protons, which results in large number of protons being accelerated by the shock.
1 More- Received 1 October 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.22.043401
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society