Ion acceleration by petawatt class laser pulses and pellet compression in a fast ignition scenario

Abstract

Ion drivers based on standard acceleration techniques have faced up to now several difficulties. We consider here a conceptual alternative to more standard schemes, such as HIDIF (Heavy Ion Driven Inertial Fusion), which are still beyond the present state of the art of particle accelerators, even though the requirements on the total beam energy are lowered by fast ignition scenarios. The new generation of petawatt class lasers open new possibilities: acceleration of electrons or protons for the fast ignition and eventually light or heavy ions acceleration for compression. The pulses of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) lasers allow ions acceleration with very high efficiency at reachable intensities ( I ∼ 10 21 W / cm 2 ), if circularly polarized light is used since we enter in the radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) regime. We analyze the possibility of accelerating carbon ion bunches by interaction of a circularly polarized pulses with an ultra-thin target. The advantage would be compactness and modularity, due to identical accelerating units. The laser efficiency required to have an acceptable net gain in the inertial fusion process is still far from the presently achievable values both for CPA short pulses and for long pulses used for direct illumination. Conversely the energy conversion efficiency from the laser pulse to the ion bunch is high and grows with the intensity. As a consequence the energy loss is not the major concern. For a preliminary investigation of the ions bunch production we have used the PIC code ALaDyn developed to analyze the results of the INFN-CNR PLASMONX experiment at Frascati National Laboratories (Rome, Italy) where the 0.3 PW laser FLAME will accelerate electrons and protons. We present the results of some 1D simulations and parametric scan concerning the acceleration of carbon ions that we suppose to be fully ionized. Circularly polarized laser pulses of 50 J and 50–100 fs duration, illuminating a 100 μ m 2 area of a 20 nm thick carbon target, produce 2 × 10 11 monoenergetic ions of 0.5 GeV with 30% efficiency. Fully 3D simulations show a non-dramatic degradation of the beam properties. In order to reach regimes interesting for the inertial fusion, 1–2 kJ lasers with pulse duration in the 100–500 fs range should be considered with an illuminated surface of few hundreds squared microns, which would insure ∼ 10 12 ions per shot to be produced. The efficiencies would range from 30% to 70% so that the energy of ions would vary from 0.3 to 1.5 kJ. With a few hundreds of such lasers a total energy of ∼ 0.2 – 0.6 MJ , required in the fast ignition scenario, would be reached. By tailoring the space distribution of the beams and their time sequence an adiabatic compression may be reached avoiding the issues related to the charge neutralization in the final focus.