L3-HAPLS (High-repetition-rate Advanced Petawatt Laser System) at ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure) Beamlines currently delivers 0.45 PW pulses (12 J in 27 fs) at 3.3 Hz repetition rate. A fresh target surface for every shot was placed at the laser focus using an in-house tape target system designed to withstand large laser intensities and energies. It has been tested for different material...
A multi-shot target assembly for laser-plasma proton acceleration has been commissioned at the Laser Laboratory for Acceleration and Applications (L2A2), at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The assembly consists of a multi-target wheel holding plain target foils for around 1000 – 2000 shots. Two linear stages and one rotating stage hold the target wheel and move it to replenish the...
We will give an update on the current developments on our target positioning system for levitating, isolated micro spheres. The Paul trap system is specifically designed to ensure functionality at high-power laser systems. Active damping enables reliable overlap of the micrometer-sized target with the micrometer-sized laser focus.
The complete target system can now be fully remote controlled....
After the interaction between an intense laser pulse and a solid target, the target is usually destroyed. Due to this damage, a target delivery technique must be implemented to renew the target with the required repetition rate and precision. This process must be done carefully to maintain the target in focus at high repetition rate (1 kHz), since an online measurement of the target position...
In the past four years we have investigated gold ion acceleration at the Texas Petawatt laser (Austin, Texas with a pulse length of 110 fs) and the GSI PHELIX laser in Darmstadt (with a pulse length of 500 fs) [1,2] in the context of developing the novel ‘fission-fusion’ nuclear reaction mechanism [3]. In order to allow for efficient heavy-ion acceleration with kinetic cutoff-energies above 5...
Modern laser facilities for Laser-Driven Plasma Acceleration (LDPA) reach intensities < $10^{20}W/cm^{2}$ making them capable of accelerating particles up to the relativistic regime. In order to have an efficient acceleration mechanism the laser pulse needs to interact with the laser at its top intensity, nonetheless effects like ASE and pre-pulses can generate intensities high above the metal...
