Uncovering Patterns from Laser Proton Acceleration Experiments

We compiled the largest dataset regarding the maximum proton energy from intense laser ion acceleration experiments with over 850 data points from 59 scientific papers. We found that there is a positive correlation between laser intensity and maximum proton energy, but this correlation also depends on several different experimental parameters in a complex way. The Schreiber model [PRL 97, 045055 (2006)] is found to be a reasonable upper bound on maximum proton energy based only on laser power and energy absorption efficiency. The increased size of this dataset allows us to make a more generalized comparison between theoretical models and experiment compared to previous work.