Multi-Cascade Proton Acceleration by Superintense Laser Pulse in the Regime of Relativistically Induced Slab Transparency

A regime of multi-cascade proton acceleration in the interaction of $10^{21}-10^{22}$ W/cm$^2$ laser pulse with a structured target is proposed. The regime is based on the electron charge displacement under the action of laser ponderomotive force and on the effect of relativistically induced slab transparency which allows to realize idea of multi-cascade acceleration. It is shown that a target comprising several properly spaced apart thin foils can optimize the acceleration process and give at the output quasi-monoenergetic beams of protons with energies up to hundreds of MeV with energy spread of just few percent.Comment: 5 pages with 4 figure

Ultrarelativistic nanoplasmonics as a new route towards extreme intensity attosecond pulses

The generation of ultra-strong attosecond pulses through laser-plasma interactions offers the opportunity to surpass the intensity of any known laboratory radiation source, giving rise to new experimental possibilities, such as quantum electrodynamical tests and matter probing at extremely short scales. Here we demonstrate that a laser irradiated plasma surface can act as an efficient converter from the femto- to the attosecond range, giving a dramatic rise in pulse intensity. Although seemingly similar schemes have been presented in the literature, the present setup deviates significantly from previous attempts. We present a new model describing the nonlinear process of relativistic laser-plasma interaction. This model, which is applicable to a multitude of phenomena, is shown to be in excellent agreement with particle-in-cell simulations. We provide, through our model, the necessary details for an experiment to be performed. The possibility to reach intensities above 10^26 W/cm^2, using upcoming 10 petawatt laser sources, is demonstrated.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

One-dimensional steady-state structures at relativistic interaction of laser radiation with overdense plasma for finite electron temperature

One-dimensional steady-state plasma-field structures in overdense plasma are studied assuming that the electron temperature is uniform over plasma bulk and the ions are stationary. It is shown that there may exist solutions for electron distributions with cavitation regions in plasma under the action of ponderomotive forceComment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Towards attosecond-scale highly directed GeV gamma-ray sources with multipetawatt-class lasers

We consider a possibility of constructing a gamma-ray source based on the multibeam configuration of a multipetawatt laser system which we simulate using a converging dipole wave. It is shown that such a configuration of fields allows the generation of gamma radiation with narrow directivity of about 1 mrad in the form of pulse trains or isolated pulses on the attosecond timescale. The influence of quantum electrodynamic cascade development on the parameters of generated gamma bursts is studied

Hybrid CPU + Xeon Phi implementation of the Particle-in-Cell method for plasma simulation

This paper presents experimental results of Particle-in-Cell plasma simulation on a hybrid system with CPUs and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. We consider simulation of two relevant laserdriven particle acceleration regimes using the Particle-in-Cell code PICADOR. On a node of a cluster with 2 CPUs and 2 Xeon Phi coprocessors the hybrid CPU + Xeon Phi configuration allows to fully utilize the computational resources of the node. It outperforms both CPU-only and Xeon Phi-only configurations with the speedups between 1.36 x and 1.68 x

Particle-in-Cell laser-plasma simulation on Xeon Phi coprocessors

This paper concerns the development of a high-performance implementation of the Particle-in-Cell method for plasma simulation on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. We discuss the suitability of the method for Xeon Phi architecture and present our experience in the porting and optimization of the existing parallel Particle-in-Cell code PICADOR. Direct porting without code modification gives performance on Xeon Phi close to that of an 8-core CPU on a benchmark problem with 50 particles per cell. We demonstrate step-by-step optimization techniques, such as improving data locality, enhancing parallelization efficiency and vectorization leading to an overall 4.2 x speedup on CPU and 7.5 x on Xeon Phi compared to the baseline version. The optimized version achieves 16.9 ns per particle update on an Intel Xeon E5-2660 CPU and 9.3 ns per particle update on an Intel Xeon Phi 5110P. For a real problem of laser ion acceleration in targets with surface grating, where a large number of macroparticles per cell is required, the speedup of Xeon Phi compared to CPU is 1.6x