Laser Ion Acceleration and Its Medical Application

Laser acceleration and its future

Laser acceleration is based on the concept to marshal collective fields that may be induced by laser. In order to exceed the material breakdown field by a large factor, we employ the broken-down matter of plasma. While the generated wakefields resemble with the fields in conventional accelerators in their structure (at least qualitatively), it is their extreme accelerating fields that distingui...

Laser Acceleration and Laser Cooling for Ion Beams

Cooling and acceleration of ions by lasers has gained increasing attention over the last years. The common interest is to further increase the luminosity of ion beams, either by shrinking the phase space occupied by the beam, or simply via increasing the number of particles. Recently, laser cooling has demonstrated ion beam crystallization as the ultimate reduction of the beam temperature. On t...

Laser-ion acceleration through controlled surface contamination

Ion acceleration from laser-driven electrostatic shocks

Multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations are used to study the generation of electrostatic shocks in plasma and the reflection of background ions to produce high-quality and high-energy ion beams. Electrostatic shocks are driven by the interaction of two plasmas with different density and/or relative drift velocity. The energy and number of ions reflected by the shock increase with increa...

Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction

Ion acceleration driven by superintense laser pulses is attracting an impressive and steadily increasing effort. Motivations can be found in the applicative potential and in the perspective to investigate novel regimesasavailable laser intensitieswill be increasing.Experimentshavedemonstrated, over awide range of laser and target parameters, the generation of multi-MeV proton and ion beams with...