FoilLCT: Ion Acceleration from a Liquid-Crystal Target

Section author: Axel Huebl

Module author: Axel Huebl, T. Kluge

The following example models a laser-ion accelerator in the [TNSA] regime. An optically over-dense target (\(n_\text{max} = 192 n_\text{c}\)) consisting of a liquid-crystal material 8CB (4-octyl-4’-cyanobiphenyl) \(C_{21}H_{25}N\) is used [LCT].

Irradiated with a high-power laser pulse with \(a_0 = 5\) the target is assumed to be partly pre-ionized due to realistic laser contrast and pre-pulses to \(C^{2+}\), \(H^+\) and \(N^{2+}\) while being slightly expanded on its surfaces (modeled as exponential density slope). The overall target is assumed to be initially quasi-neutral and the 8CB ion components are are not demixed in the surface regions. Surface contamination with, e.g. water vapor is neglected.

The laser is assumed to be in focus and approximated as a plane wave with temporally Gaussian intensity envelope of \(\tau^\text{FWHM}_I = 25\) fs.

This example is used to demonstrate:

with PIConGPU.

References

[TNSA]

S.C. Wilks, A.B. Langdon, T.E. Cowan, M. Roth, M. Singh, S. Hatchett, M.H. Key, D. Pennington, A. MacKinnon, and R.A. Snavely. Energetic proton generation in ultra-intense laser-solid interactions, Physics of Plasmas 8, 542 (2001), https://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1333697

[LCT]

P.L. Poole, L. Obst, G.E. Cochran, J. Metzkes, H.-P. Schlenvoigt, I. Prencipe, T. Kluge, T.E. Cowan, U. Schramm, and D.W. Schumacher. Laser-driven ion acceleration via target normal sheath acceleration in the relativistic transparency regime, New Journal of Physics 20, 013019 (2018), https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/aa9d47