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Register a new userNon-Maxwellian electron distributions resulting from direct laser acceleration in near-critical plasmas
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The irradiation of few nm thick targets by a finite-contrast high-intensity short-pulse laser results in a strong pre-expansion of these targets at the arrival time of the main pulse. The targets decompress to near and lower than critical densities plasmas extending over few micrometers, i.e. multiple wavelengths. The interaction of the main pulse with such a highly localized but inhomogeneous target leads to the generation of a short channel and further self-focusing of the laser beam. Experiments at the GHOST laser system at UT Austin using such targets measured non-Maxwellian, peaked electron distribution with large bunch charge and high electron density in the laser propagation direction. These results are reproduced in 2D PIC simulations using the EPOCH code, identifying Direct Laser Acceleration (DLA) as the responsible mechanism. This is the first time that DLA has been observed to produce peaked spectra as opposed to broad, maxwellian spectra observed in earlier experiments. This high-density electrons have potential applications as injector beams for a further wakefield acceleration stage as well as for pump-probe applications.
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The production of polarized proton beams with multi-GeV energies in ultra-intense laser interaction with targets is studied with three-dimensional Particle-In-Cell simulations. A near-critical density plasma target with pre-polarized proton and tritium ions is considered for the proton acceleration. The pre-polarized protons are initially accelerated by laser radiation pressure before injection and further acceleration in a bubble-like wakefield. The temporal dynamics of proton polarization is tracked via the T-BMT equation, and it is found that the proton polarization state can be altered both by the laser field and the magnetic component of the wakefield. The dependence of the proton acceleration and polarization on the ratio of the ion species is determined, and it is found that the protons can be efficiently accelerated as long as their relative fraction is less than 20%, in which case the bubble size is large enough for the protons to obtain sufficient energy to overcome the bubble injection threshold.
The collision frequencies of electron-neutral-particle in the weakly ionized complex plasmas with the non-Maxwellian velocity distributions are studied. The average collision frequencies of electron-neutral-particle in the plasmas are derived accurately. We find that these collision frequencies are significantly dependent on the power-law spectral indices of non-Maxwellian distribution functions and so they are generally different from the collision frequencies in the plasmas with a Maxwellian velocity distribution, which will affect the transport properties of the charged particles in the plasmas. Numerically analyses are made to show the roles of the spectral indices in the average collision frequencies respectively.
The before described general principles and methodology of calculating electron wave propagation in homogeneous isotropic half-infinity slab of Maxwellian plasma with indefinite but in principal value sense taken integrals in characteristic equations, and the use of 2D Laplace transform method are applied to an evaluation of collision damping decrements of plane electron longitudinal and transverse waves. Damping decrement tends to infinity when the wave frequency tends to electron Langmuir frequency from above values. We considered recurrent relations for amplitudes of the overtones which form in their sum the all solution of the plasma wave non-linear equations including collision damping and quadratic (non-linear) terms. Collisionless damping at frequencies more the Langmuir one is possible only in non-Maxwellian plasmas.
We present techniques to perturb, measure and model the ion velocity distribution in an ultracold neutral plasma produced by photoionization of strontium atoms. By optical pumping with circularly polarized light we promote ions with certain velocities to a different spin ground state, and probe the resulting perturbed velocity distribution through laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy. We discuss various approaches to extract the velocity distribution from our measured spectra, and assess their quality through comparisons with molecular dynamic simulations
Laser-driven collisonless electrostatic shock formation and the subsequent ion acceleration have been studied in near critical density plasmas. Particle-in-cell simulations show that both the speed of laser-driven collisionless electrostatic shock and the energies of shock-accelerated ions can be greatly enhanced due to fast laser propagation in near critical density plasmas. However, a response time longer than tens of laser wave cycles is required before the shock formation in a near critical density plasma, in contrast to the quick shock formation in a highly overdense target. More important, we find that some ions can be reflected by the collisionless shock even if the electrostatic potential jump across the shock is smaller than the ion kinetic energy in the shock frame, which seems against the conventional ion-reflection condition. These anomalous ion reflections are attributed to the strongly time-oscillating electric field accompanying laser-driven collisionless shock in a near critical density plasma.
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