Stable laser-produced quasimonoenergetic proton beams from interactive laser and target shaping

In radiation pressure dominated laser ion acceleration schemes, transverse target deformation and Rayleigh-Taylor (RT)-like instability always develop quickly, break the acceleration structure, limit the final accelerated ion energy, and lower the beam quality. To overcome these issues, we propose a target design named dual parabola targets consisting of a lateral thick part and a middle thin part, each with a parabolic front surface of different focus positions. By using such a target, through interactive laser and target shaping processes, the central part of the thin target will detach from the whole target and a microtarget is formed. This enables the stable acceleration of the central part of the target to high energy with high quality since usual target deformation and RT-like instabilities with planar targets are suppressed. Furthermore, this target design reduces the laser intensity required to optimize radiation pressure acceleration by more than 1 order of magnitude compared to normal flat targets with similar thickness and density. Two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations indicate that a quasimonoenergetic proton beam with peak energy over 200 MeV and energy spread around 2% can be generated when such a solid target (with density 400nc and target thickness 0.5λ₀) is irradiated by a 100 fs long circularly polarized laser pulse at focused intensity IL~9.2×10²¹ W/cm².