Guiding and collimation of laser-accelerated proton beams using thin foils followed with a hollow plasma channel

It is proposed that guided and collimated proton acceleration by intense lasers can be achieved using an advanced target-a thin foil followed by a hollow plasma channel. For the advanced target, the laser-accelerated hot electrons can be confined in the hollow channel at the foil rear side, which leads to the formation of transversely localized, Gaussian-distributed sheath electric field and resultantly guiding of proton acceleration. Further, due to the hot electron flow along the channel wall, a strong focusing transverse electric field is induced, taking the place of the original defocusing one driven by hot electron pressure in the case of a purely thin foil target, which results in collimation of proton beams. Two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that collimated proton beams with energy about 20 MeV and nearly half-reduced divergence of 26 degrees are produced at laser intensities 10(20)W/cm(2) by using the advanced target. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.National Natural Science Foundation of China [91230205, 11575031, 11575298, 11175026]; National Basic Research 973 Project [2013CB834100]; National High-Tech 863 Project; Thousand Young Talents Program of ChinaSCI(E)EIARTICLEzcangtao@iapcm.ac.cn; bqiao@pku.edu.cn92