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Creation of highly charged gold ion beam through collisional ionizations in a dense gold plasma driven by a femtosecond petawatt laser

Masayasu Hata1,*, Chang Liu1, James Kevin Koga1, Natsumi Iwata2, Yasuhiko Sentoku2, and Mamiko Nishiuchi1,†

  • *Contact author: hata.masayasu@qst.go.jp
  • †Contact author: nishiuchi.mamiko@qst.go.jp
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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033200 – Published 29 August, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/8k98-6q48

Abstract

Numerical investigations of the ionization mechanisms in the high-temperature high-density gold plasma formed by a high-contrast high-intensity laser pulse interacting with gold foil are performed to investigate high-efficiency gold ion acceleration with few petawatt (PW)-level laser systems, aiming at producing ≳10 MeV/u gold beams required to serve as an alternative to the front end of a conventional heavy-ion accelerator complex such as an ion source, linac, and drift tube linac. Short-pulse high-intensity laser pulses with a peak intensity of a few times 1022Wcm−2, which is not strong enough to expel Au L-shell electrons by laser field ionization, are shown to sufficiently resistively heat up the target bulk temperature so that collisional ionization by electrons in the plasma can expel L-shell electrons. The resultant highly charged Au ions (∼+72±4) are exposed to the sheath field and accelerated to higher energies of ∼20 MeV/u.

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033200– Published 29 August, 2025
  • Received 17 June 2025
  • Accepted 1 August 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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