Intense high-quality medical proton beams via laser fields

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through simulations that crossed laser beams can produce high-quality, monoenergetic proton beams exceeding 200 MeV with minimal energy spread, suitable for medical applications like cancer therapy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel all-optical scheme using crossed laser beams for efficient post-acceleration of protons with high energy and quality, advancing laser-plasma acceleration technology.

Findings

Protons can be efficiently post-accelerated using crossed laser beams.

Produced proton beams have energies >200 MeV with ~1% energy spread.

The scheme is suitable for hadron cancer therapy applications.

Abstract

During the past decade, the interaction of high-intensity lasers with solid targets has attracted much interest, regarding its potential in accelerating charged particles. In spite of tremendous progress in laser-plasma based acceleration, it is still not clear which particle beam quality will be accessible within the upcoming multi petawatt (1 PW = 10$^{15}$ W) laser generation. Here, we show with simulations based on the coupled relativistic equations of motion that protons stemming from laser-plasma processes can be efficiently post-accelerated using crossed laser beams focused to spot radii of a few laser wavelengths. We demonstrate that the crossed beams produce monoenergetic accelerated protons with kinetic energies $> 200$ MeV, small energy spreads ($\approx$ 1$%$) and high densities as required for hadron cancer therapy. To our knowledge, this is the first scheme allowing for this important application based on an all-optical set-up.