Simultaneous observation of ultrafast electron and proton beams in TNSA
1 Introduction
The invention of chirped pulse amplification [1] has provided a huge boost to laser technology, allowing the development of ultrashort lasers. In less than 20 years, TW (1012 W) and PW (1015 W) class systems have been built around the world[2], becoming extremely useful tools to study the interaction with plasma.
In particular, the use of intensities
The ion/proton production and acceleration processes are extremely connected to the electron population directly accelerated by the laser in the early stage of the so-called target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA) phenomenon. The electron energy spectrum is distributed following a Maxwell distribution with a characteristic energy where
These hot electrons cross the target and leave an unbalanced positive charge on it, establishing a quasi-static potential. While most of them are stopped in the vicinity of the back surface, within a distance of the Debye length[8], only the fastest ones, constituting a small fraction of the entire population, can completely escape from the potential. The latter, in turn, is responsible for ion acceleration[9, 10]. Studying the fast component of the electron population, hereinafter called ultrafast electrons, can reveal an interesting aspect of the whole process and help to optimize the proton acceleration.
At the SPARC_LAB Test Facility[11], ultrafast electro-optic sampling (EOS) diagnostics[12, 13] have been installed in the FLAME laser[14] target area. This allows us to perform temporally resolved measurements on fast electrons with about 100 fs resolution[15, 16]. In a previous work, we have shown how this diagnostic tool can investigate electron beam properties, in terms of charge, energy and duration, while changing the target geometry[17]. Moreover, we have also employed our EOS probing line to study the evolution of electric fields emitted by high-intensity lasers (
In addiction, we added a time-of-flight (TOF) diamond detector to the pre-existing experimental setup[20], employed as proton energy spectrum diagnostics[21–24]. In the present work, we report preliminary studies on simultaneous time resolved measurements about ultrafast electron and proton populations by varying laser parameters.
2 Experimental setup
The experiment has been carried out at the SPARC_LAB Test Facility[11] by exploiting the high-power laser FLAME[14], delivering routinely down to 25 fs and up to 4 J pulses at 10 Hz on the target. After optical compression, the laser beam is focused by means of an
A small portion of the main beam is split and used as a completely temporal jitter-free probe laser line. The two laser beams are synchronized at the fs level in the interaction point by means of an autocorrelator, consisting of an
Fig. 1. Experimental setup. The FLAME laser is sent to an aluminium target. The charged particles emitted during this interaction are revealed by two single-shot time resolved measurements: electro-optic sampling diagnostics, able to measure the electric field carried by relativistic fast electrons, and a time-of-flight diamond detector, used to measure the temporal distribution of protons arriving at it and to retrieve their energy spectra[20].
The experimental setup is shown in Figure
The temporal structure of the positively charged beam has been measured by means of an electromagnetic-pulse-free TOF diamond detector[26, 27], placed 1.05 m downstream of the target at 0° with respect to the laser direction. This tool allowed us to retrieve the proton energy spectrum for each shot[20].
3 Experimental results and discussion
We have performed simultaneous measurements on ultrafast electron charge and temporal length, and proton energy by changing the laser temporal length from 30 to 300 fs (full width at half maximum (FWHM)) and the focal spot size from 30 to 120 μm (
The laser energy on the target was kept constant at 2 J.
All the experimental values are reported with their own statistical error, since more shots have been collected for each parameter set.
Initially, we tried to determine our best thickness value among the available ones, i.e., 7 μm, 10 μm and 20 μm, optimizing the proton energy as seen in previous works[28]. Thin targets (∼1 μm) seem to be preferable, but they can be massively perturbed by the nanosecond-long laser pedestal coming before the main pulse, able even to destroy the target. Unfortunately, in the explored range, both the charge and the temporal duration of ultrafast electrons and the proton maximum energy are constant within the statistical error.
Fig. 2. Simultaneous detection of the (a) ultrafast electron charge, (b) temporal length, and maximum proton energy for different available target thicknesses.
Fig. 3. Simultaneous detection of the (a) ultrafast electron charge, (b) temporal length, and maximum proton energy for different laser durations.
Figure
Once the best performing target was implemented in the setup, the experimental campaign was focused on the behaviour of the electron and the proton varying the laser parameters.
For both the laser spot size and temporal duration scaling, the proton measured energy has been fitted with a power law, namely, where
Figure
This can be explained starting from the characteristic hot electron temperature
Figure
Fig. 4. Simultaneous detection of the (a) ultrafast electron charge, (b) temporal length, and maximum proton energy for different spot sizes.
We found for the maximum proton energy as a function of the laser spot size
Furthermore, rewriting Equation (
4 Comments
The two different scenarios explored in this experimental campaign gave us important feedback on the TNSA process.
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5 Conclusions
In conclusion, a characterization of the emission of fast electrons and protons, occurring in ultra-intense laser and solid matter interactions, has been performed by mainly varying the laser temporal duration and focal spot size, using two different detectors. Indeed, thanks to 100 fs temporal resolution EOS diagnostics, fast electron charge has been measured, while a chemical-vapour-deposited diamond-based TOF detector has provided the proton energy spectra.
We found an optimum thickness of 10 μm, obtaining the highest proton energy, ∼2. 9 ± 0. 1 MeV, for our experimental conditions, while the fast electron charge was almost constant, ∼1. 8 ± 0. 4 nC. By varying the laser temporal duration in the 30–300 fs range, we observed a constant behaviour in the maximum proton energy, as confirmed in Ref. [30]. In turn, the fast electron charge, detected by our EOS monitor, decreases as the laser becomes longer. Measurements were performed also for different laser intensities by changing the laser spot size on the target. The fast electron charge, as well as the maximum proton energy, decreases with reduction in the laser power density. Our measurements are in agreement with previous works where these scaling laws on the proton maximum energy were studied for femtosecond laser pulses[28, 31–33]. Concerning the ultrafast electron temporal length, we observed a stretching effect by decreasing the laser pulse intensity. This can be explained as being due to a higher velocity spread in the electron population, which becomes less relativistic since its energy strongly depends on the normalized laser vector potential
These results show the potentialities of our simultaneous detection system for both fast electrons and protons emitted as a consequence of the interaction between a high-intensity laser pulse and a solid-state target. In particular, it may be employed to better understand the whole TNSA phenomenon and how the fast electron beam can influence the proton acceleration and, at the same time, how it can be used to infer the expected proton spectra.
Article Outline
Fabrizio Bisesto, Mario Galletti, Maria Pia Anania, Gemma Costa, Massimo Ferrario, Riccardo Pompili, Arie Zigler, Fabrizio Consoli, Mattia Cipriani, Martina Salvadori, Claudio Verona. Simultaneous observation of ultrafast electron and proton beams in TNSA[J]. High Power Laser Science and Engineering, 2020, 8(2): 02000e23.