The laser driven ion acceleration is a burgeoning field of resarch
and is attracting a growing number of scientists since the first results reported in 2000 obtained
irradiating thin solid foils by high power laser pulses.
The growing interest is driven by the peculiar characteristics of the produced bunches,
the compactness of the whole accelerating system and the very short
accelerating length of this all-optical accelerators.
A fervent theoretical and experimental work has been done since then.
An important part of the theoretical study is done by means of numerical simulations and the most widely used
technique exploits PIC codes (“Particle In Cell'”).
In this thesis the PIC code AlaDyn, developed by our research group considering innovative
algorithms, is described. My work
has been devoted to the developement of the code and
the investigation of the laser driven ion acceleration
for different target configurations.
Two target configurations for the proton acceleration are
presented together with the results of the 2D and 3D numerical investigation.
One target configuration consists of a solid foil with a low density layer attached on the
irradiated side. The nearly critical plasma of the foam layer allows a very
high energy absorption by the target and an increase of the proton
energy up to a factor 3, when compared to the ``pure'' TNSA configuration.
The differences of the regime with respect to the standard TNSA are described
The case of nearly critical density targets has been investigated with
3D simulations. In this case the laser travels throughout the plasma
and exits on the rear side. During the propagation, the laser drills a channel
and induce a magnetic vortex that expanding on the rear side of the targer is source of a
very intense electric field. The protons of the plasma are
strongly accelerated up to energies of 100 MeV using a 200PW laser.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unibo.it/oai:amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it:3811 |
| Date | 06 June 2011 |
| Creators | Sgattoni, Andrea <1982> |
| Contributors | Turchetti, Giorgio |
| Publisher | Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna |
| Source Sets | Università di Bologna |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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