Towards Intelligent Control of MeV Energy Electrons and Protons from kHz Repetition Rate Ultra-Intense Laser Interactions

Ultra-intense laser interactions can accelerate electrons and protons to MeV energies, but there has been little experimental work to control the properties of these particles by systematically exploring a wide variety of laser and target conditions. This presentation describes experimental efforts towards this goal using a kHz repetition rate ultra-intense laser system with and a "liquid leaf" target. A number of improvements were made to the data acquisition capabilities of this laser system that greatly enabled efforts to train statistical models on this data in quasi-real time. These models were then used to predict laser and target parameters that would modify the MeV electron signal in a desired way. The predictions from different models were then investigated experimentally.