Laser Module Development for an Open-Source Platform and Analysis of Ion-Acceleration Models

Laser-ion acceleration is a rapidly growing field of study with exciting applications. In this project, a laser module was developed and contributed to PlasmaPy, an open-source Python platform for plasma physics research, providing laser parameter calculations commonly used in research. This module has now been made available in v2025.8.0 of PlasmaPy. In parallel, the largest experimental dataset in the field was used to test the performance of the Schreiber model, which predicts the highest energy of accelerated protons. The model was found to have a balanced performance overall, but was found to overpredict for higher values of laser power, wavelength, and angle of incidence.