Ion Acceleration by Short Chirped Laser Pulses

TL;DR

This paper theoretically explores how short, chirped laser pulses can efficiently accelerate ions to high energies, potentially useful for medical applications like cancer therapy, with fewer pulses needed than traditional methods.

Contribution

It demonstrates that short, frequency-chirped laser pulses can produce high-energy ion beams more efficiently than longer pulses, advancing laser-driven ion acceleration techniques.

Findings

Ion beams with about 1% energy broadening can be generated.

Few-cycle chirped pulses outperform long pulses in ion acceleration efficiency.

Ions can reach hundreds of MeVs with 100 J laser pulses.

Abstract

Direct laser acceleration of ions by short frequency-chirped laser pulses is investigated theoretically. We demonstrate that intense beams of ions with a kinetic energy broadening of about 1 % can be generated. The chirping of the laser pulse allows the particles to gain kinetic energies of hundreds of MeVs, which is required for hadron cancer therapy, from pulses of energies of the order of 100 J. It is shown that few-cycle chirped pulses can accelerate ions more efficiently than long ones, i.e. higher ion kinetic energies are reached with the same amount of total electromagnetic pulse energy.