Collimation of laser-produced proton beam

Abstract

In intense laser plasma interaction for particle acceleration several issues remain to be solved. In this paper we focus on a collimation of ion beam, which is produced by a laser plasma interaction. In this study, the ion beam is collimated by a thin film target. When an intense short pulse laser illuminates a target, target electrons are accelerated, and create an electron cloud that generates a sheath electric field at the target surface. Such the ion acceleration mechanism is called the target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA). The TNSA field would be used for the ion beam collimation by the electric field. We have successfully obtained a collimated beam in our particle-in-cell simulations.