Investigation of accelerated carbon ions with the presence of QED effect by ultra-intense high-power lasers

Abstract

In this study, we have investigated carbon ions, fast electrons and gamma-ray energy spectra and the corresponding temperatures when next-generation 10 petawatt (PW) lasers (irradiances of $$5\times 10^{22} \, {\mathrm {W}}\, {\mathrm {cm}}^{-2}$$ ) hit solid targets with a preformed plasma at the front surface. We employed 2D particle-in-cell (PIC) code with the presence of quantum electrodynamics (QED) effects. The maximum energy reached by the accelerated particles, and the corresponding temperature due to nonlinear plasma processes can be affected by varied plasma scale lengths. Here, we show the effects of varied plasma scale lengths on particle acceleration at irradiances on the order of $$10^{22}\,{\mathrm {W}}\,{\mathrm {cm}}^{-2}$$ , which is a new development for laser technology. We have observed that fully ionized carbon ions can reach up to 2.5 GeV energies with an optimum plasma scale length of $$1\, \upmu \hbox {m}$$ and the corresponding temperature of 40 MeV. Accelerated electron energies reach up to 1.5 GeV with the temperatures of 50 MeV for 10 PW laser–plasma interactions with the presence of QED effects. We have demonstrated that by varying plasma scale length, heavy ion energy and temperature can be controlled, which is important for various applications such as hadron therapy and X-ray imaging.