The plasma mirror system was installed on the 1 PW laser beamline of Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF) for enhancing the temporal contrast of the laser pulse. About 2 orders of magnitude improvement on pulse contrast was measured on picosecond and nanosecond time scales. The experiments show that high-contrast laser pulses can significantly improve the cutoff energy and quantity of proton beams. Then different target distributions are assumed in particles in cell simulations, which can qualitatively assume the expansion of nanometer-scale foil. The high-contrast laser enables the SULF-1PW beamline to generally be of benefit for many potential applications.

Multidimensional instabilities always develop with time during the process of radiation pressure acceleration, and are detrimental to the generation of monoenergetic proton beams. In this paper, a sharp-front laser is proposed to irradiate a triple-layer target (the proton layer is set between two carbon ion layers) and studied in theory and simulations. It is found that the thin proton layer can be accelerated once to hundreds of MeV with monoenergetic spectra only during the hole-boring (HB) stage. The carbon ions move behind the proton layer in the light-sail (LS) stage, which can shield any further interaction between the rear part of the laser and the proton layer. In this way, proton beam instabilities can be reduced to a certain extent during the entire acceleration process. It is hoped such a mechanism can provide a feasible way to improve the beam quality for proton therapy and other applications.

Vortex harmonics with fractional average orbital angular momentum are generated when a relativistic fractional vortex beam is incident on and reflected from an over-dense plane plasma target. A two-step model is presented to explain the far-field patterns of the harmonics. In the first step, a fundamental spot-shaped hole is produced during the hole-boring stage, and harmonics are generated simultaneously. In the second step, different order harmonics are diffracted by the hole and propagate to the far field. This process can be accurately described by the Fraunhofer diffraction theory. This work facilitates a basic recognition of fractional vortex beams.