Efficient laser-driven proton acceleration in the ultra-short pulse regime

The work described in this thesis is concerned with the experimental investigation of the acceleration of high energy proton pulses generated by relativistic laser-plasma interaction and their application. Using the high intensity 150 TW Ti:sapphire based ultra-short pulse laser Draco, a laser-driven proton source was set up and characterized. Conducting experiments on the basis of the established target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA) process, proton energies of up to 20 MeV were obtained. The reliable performance of the proton source was demonstrated in the first direct and dose controlled comparison of the radiobiological effectiveness of intense proton pulses with that of conventionally generated continuous proton beams for the irradiation of in vitro tumour cells. As potential application radiation therapy calls for proton energies exceeding 200 MeV. Therefore the scaling of the maximum proton energy with laser power was investigated and observed to be near-linear for the case of ultra-short laser pulses. This result is attributed to the efficient predominantly quasi-static acceleration in the short acceleration period close to the target rear surface. This assumption is furthermore confirmed by the observation of prominent non-target-normal emission of energetic protons reflecting an asymmetry in the field distribution of promptly accelerated electrons generated by using oblique laser incidence or angularly chirped laser pulses. Supported by numerical simulations, this novel diagnostic reveals the relevance of the initial prethermal phase of the acceleration process preceding the thermal plasma sheath expansion of TNSA. During the plasma expansion phase, the efficiency of the proton acceleration can be improved using so called reduced mass targets (RMT). By confining the lateral target size which avoids the dilution of the expanding sheath and thus increases the strength of the accelerating sheath fields a significant increase of the proton energy and the proton yield was observed