Ultra-intense femtosecond super-heavy ion beams driven by a multi-PW laser

The paper reports the results of numerical studies on the laser-driven acceleration of super-heavy ions by a multi-PW laser pulse of ultra-relativistic intensity attainable with the Extreme Light Infrastructure lasers currently being built in Europe. Using a multi-dimensional (2D3V) particle-in-cell code, it is shown that multi-GeV super-heavy (thorium) ion beams with an intensity of ∼1021-1022W/cm2, fluence ∼1017-1018cm−2 and time duration ∼20-100fs can be produced from a sub-μm thorium target irradiated by a 150-J, 20-fs laser pulse with an intensity of 1023W/cm2. Such ion beams are impossible to obtain presently with the use of conventional RF-driven accelerators, so they can open the door to new areas of research in both nuclear and high energy-density physics.