Abstract
With the development of ultra-intense laser technology, MeV ions can be obtained from laser–foil interactions in the laboratory. These energetic ion beams can be applied in fast ignition for inertial confinement fusion, medical therapy, and proton imaging. However, these ions are mainly accelerated in the laser propagation direction. Ion acceleration in an azimuthal orientation was scarcely studied. In this research, a doughnut Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) laser is used for the first time to examine laser–plasma interaction in the relativistic intensity regime in three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. Studies have shown that a novel rotation of the plasma is produced from the hollow screw-like drill of an mode laser. The angular momentum of particles in the longitudinal direction produced by the LG laser is enhanced compared with that produced by the usual laser pulses, such as linearly and circularly polarized Gaussian pulses. Moreover, the particles (including electrons and ions) can be trapped and uniformly compressed in the dark central minimum of the doughnut LG pulse. The hollow-structured LG laser has potential applications in the generation of x-rays with orbital angular momentum, plasma accelerators, fast ignition for inertial confinement fusion, and pulsars in the astrophysical environment.
Highlights
State Key Laboratory of High Field Laser Physics, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O
The angular momentum produced by such structure is sometimes referred to an orbital angular momentum, which is different from the spin angular momentum produced by the circularly polarized (CP) laser pulse[47]
The mode of the LG laser pulse (LGlp) is described by integer indices l and p, where l denotes the number of 2p phase cycles around the circumference and (p 1 1) denotes the number of radial nodes in the mode profile
Summary
This feature is important in laser cooling and trapping experiments because the repulsive optical dipole force for blue detuned laser light restricts the atoms to the inner dark region of the laser beam, where photon scattering and the associated heating are minimized Such hollow-structured LG laser can be used to investigate some difficult problems, such as www.nature.com/scientificreports generation of x-rays with orbital angular momentum[52,53,54], plasma accelerators[55,56], fast ignition for inertial confinement fusion[57,58,59], and pulsars in the astrophysical environment[60]
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