Laser ion acceleration with micro-grooved targets

This paper reports on recent results of a series of experiments on laser-generated ion beams. The experiments were done at the 30 TW ‘Trident’ laser system at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, USA, and we demonstrated the first accelerated ions at the 10 TW beamline of the PHELIX laser system at Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt, Germany. The experiments show the dependence of the Target Normal Sheath Acceleration Process (TNSA) on laser imprint and target parameters. The results are compared to a simple model for the ion propagation. It shows that TNSA-driven protons form an ion beam with superior beam quality, following the versatile spatial beam-shaping approaches.