Quasimonoenergetic proton bunches generation from doped foil targets irradiated by intense lasers

Abstract

We propose a scheme to generate 10 MeV-level quasimonoenergetic proton bunches using proton-doped heavy-ion targets irradiated by intense lasers via target normal sheath acceleration. The heavy substrate ions provide a long-life quasi-stable sheath field to accelerate the doped protons at the target rear and consequently a quasimonoenergetic proton bunch is produced. The scheme is demonstrated by two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. An exemplificative simulation with parameters of targets made by ion-implant technique, a kind of modern doping process, gives a quasimonoenergetic bunch with peak energy ∼13MeV, energy spread ∼24%, and ∼nC charge at the focused laser intensity 1020W/cm2.