Spin-polarized 3He shock waves from a solid-gas composite target at high laser intensities

Abstract

We investigate collisionless shock acceleration of spin-polarized 3 He for laser pulses with normalized vector potentials in the range a0=100−200 . The setup utilized in the 2D-particle-in-cell simulations consists of a solid carbon foil that is placed in front of the main Helium target. The foil is heated by the laser pulse and shields the Helium from the highly oscillating fields. In turn, a shock wave with more homogeneous fields is induced, leading to highly polarized ion beams. We observe that the inclusion of radiation reaction into our simulations leads to a higher beam charge without affecting the polarization degree to a significant extent.