The role of collisional ionization in heavy ion acceleration by high intensity laser pulses

Afshari, M.; Morris, S.; Geulig, L. D.; Chitgar, Z. M.; Gibbon, P.; Thirolf, P. G.; Schreiber, J. (2022): The role of collisional ionization in heavy ion acceleration by high intensity laser pulses. Scientific Reports, 12 (1). ISSN 2045-2322

Abstract

We present here simulation results of the laser-driven acceleration of gold ions using the EPOCH code. Recently, an experiment reported the acceleration of gold ions up to 7 MeV/nucleon with a strong dependency of the charge-state distribution on target thickness and the detection of the highest charge states Z∼72
. Our simulations using a developmental branch of EPOCH (4.18-Ionization) show that collisional ionization is the most important cause of charge states beyond Z = 51 up to He-like Au.

• Doc-Type: Article (LMU)
• Organisational unit (Faculties): 17 Physics
• DFG subject classification of scientific disciplines: Natural sciences
• DFG: Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - 491502892