Enhanced ion acceleration from transparency-driven foils demonstrated at two ultraintense laser facilities

Laser-driven ion sources are a rapidly developing technology producing high energy,high peak current beams.Their suitability for applications,such as compact medical accelerators,motivates development of robust acceleration schemes using widely available repetitive ultraintense femtosecond lasers.These applications not only require high beam energy,but also place demanding requirements on the source stability and controllability.This can be seriously affected by the laser temporal contrast,precluding the replication of ion acceleration performance on independent laser systems with otherwise similar parameters.Here,we present the experimental generation of>60 MeV protons and>30 MeV u-1 carbon ions from sub-micrometre thickness Formvar foils irradiated with laser intensities>1021 Wcm2.Ions are accelerated by an extreme localised space charge field≥30TVm-1,over a million times higher than used in conventional accelerators.The field is formed by a rapid expulsion of electrons from the target bulk due to relativistically induced transparency,in which relativistic corrections to the refractive index enables laser transmission through normally opaque plasma.We replicate the mechanism on two different laser facilities and show that the optimum target thickness decreases with improved laser contrast due to reduced pre-expansion.Our demonstration that energetic ions can be accelerated by this mechanism at different contrast levels relaxes laser requirements and indicates interaction parameters for realising application-specific beam delivery.

Characterization of the plasma mirror system at the J-KAREN-P facility

We report on the design and characterization of the plasma mirror system installed on the J-KAREN-P laser at the Kansai Photon Science Institute,National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology.The reflectivity of the single plasma mirror system exceeded 80%.In addition,the temporal contrast was improved by two orders of magnitude at 1 ps before the main pulse.Furthermore,the laser near-field spatial distribution after the plasma mirror was kept constant at plasma mirror fluence of less than 100 kJ/cm^(2).We also present the results of investigating the difference and the fluctuation in energy,pulse width and pointing stability with and without the plasma mirror system.

Enhancement of pre-pulse and picosecond pedestal contrast of the petawatt J-KAREN-P laser

We have experimentally improved the temporal contrast of the petawatt J-KAREN-P laser facility.We have investigated how the generation of pre-pulses by post-pulses changes due to the temporal overlap between the stretched pulse and the post-pulse in a chirped-pulse amplification system.We have shown that the time at which the pre-pulse is generated by the post-pulse and its shape are related to the time difference between the stretched main pulse and the post-pulse.With this investigation,we have found and identified the origins of the pre-pulses and have demonstrated the removal of most pre-pulses by eliminating the post-pulse with wedged optics.We have also demonstrated the impact of stretcher optics on the picosecond pedestal.We have realized orders of magnitude enhancement of the pedestal by improving the optical quality of a key component in the stretcher.