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:
an ion acceleration setup with
ionization models for field ionization and collisional ionization
with PIConGPU.
References
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
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