Speaker
Description
High-intensity laser-plasma interactions provide access to accelerating fields far exceeding those achievable in conventional accelerators, offering a pathway toward compact sources of energetic particles. However, accelerated ion energies in laser-driven experiments are currently limited to approximately 150 MeV per nucleon; the small charge-to-mass ratio of ions makes standard laser wakefield acceleration inefficient. In this work, we show that a relativistic laser pulse with a focal spot sweeping transversely across the propagation axis—a transverse flying-focus configuration—can enable efficient wakefield acceleration of ions in underdense plasma. Three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations demonstrate that this spatiotemporally structured pulse generates a co-moving electrostatic trapping region capable of capturing and accelerating ions to GeV energies. For a peak laser intensity of $10^{20}$ W/cm2 and an acceleration length of 0.44 cm, the mechanism produces a proton beam with 23.1 pC charge, a peak energy of 1.6 GeV, and a relative energy spread of 3.7%. These results indicate that a transverse flying-focus configuration provides a promising route toward compact, high-repetition-rate sources of high-energy ions and illustrate the broader potential of advanced spatiotemporal pulse shaping for overcoming long-standing limitations in laser-plasma accelerators.
| Working group | WG2 |
|---|