Study of the parameter dependence of laser-accelerated protons from a hydrogen cluster source

Abstract

We present a study on laser-driven proton acceleration from a hydrogen cluster target. Aiming for the optimization of the proton source, we performed a detailed parametric scan of the interaction conditions by varying different parameters of the laser and the target. While the underlying process of a Coulomb-explosion (CE) delivers moderate energies, in the 100s keV range, the use of hydrogen as target material comes with the benefit of a debris-free, single-species proton acceleration scheme, enabling high repetition-rate experiments, which are very robust against shot-to-shot fluctuations.