Enhancing the electron acceleration by a circularly polarized laser interaction with a cone-target with an external longitudinal magnetic field

Abstract

The propagation of left-hand (LH-) and right-hand (RH-) circularly polarized (CP) lasers and the accompanying generation of fast electrons in a magnetized cone-target with pre-formed plasmas are investigated. In this work, the strength of external magnetic field is comparable to that of the incident laser. Theoretical analyses indicate that the cut-off density of LH-CP laser is larger than that without an external magnetic field. When the external magnetic field normalized by the laser magnetic field is larger than the relativistic factor, the RH-CP laser will keep on propagating till the laser energy is depleted. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. Simulation results show that in the presence of external longitudinal magnetic field, the energies and yields of fast electrons are greatly enhanced for RH-CP laser. Besides, the coupling efficiency of laser energy to energetic electrons for RH-CP laser is much higher than that for LH-CP laser and without external magnetic field. Furthermore, detailed simulation results perform an enhancement of the incident laser absorption with increasing external magnetic field.