Investigation of Magnetic Vortex Acceleration at BELLA iP2
ORAL
Abstract
The interaction of an ultra-intense laser pulse with a near critical density (NCD) target results in the formation of a plasma channel, a strong azimuthal magnetic field and moving vortices. An application of this is the generation of energetic and collimated ion beams via Magnetic Vortex Acceleration (MVA). An experimental campaign is scheduled to study this regime at iP2, the newly constructed short focal length beamline of the BELLA PW facility. A series of 3D simulations, using the WarpX code, was performed to study the robustness of the MVA mechanism when applying our realistic experimental conditions. Of particular interest is the acceleration performance with different laser temporal contrast conditions, in some cases leading to pre-expanded target profiles prior to the arrival of the main pulse. We studied the pre-plasma effects on the structure of the accelerating fields and performed a detailed analysis of the ion beam properties and the efficiency of the process.
*This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) Postdoctoral Research Program administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (DE-SC0014664) for the DOE, the U.S. DOE Office of Science, Offices of FES and High Energy Physics, LaserNetUS, the Exascale Computing Project (17-SC-20-SC), and used computing resources at OLCF (DE-AC05-00OR22725) and NERSC (DE-AC02-05CH11231).
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Publication:S Hakimi, L Obst-Huebl, A Huebl, K Nakamura, S Bulanov, S Steinke, W Leemans, Z Kober, T Ostermayer, T Schenkel, A Gonsalves, J-L Vay, J van Tilborg, C Toth, C Schroeder, E Esarey and C Geddes, "Laser-solid interaction studies enabled by the new capabilities of the iP2 BELLA PW beamline", accepted for publication at Physics of Plasmas (2022)
