Title:

Towards Tunable Laser-Driven Particle Sources in Support of High-Energy Density Physics

Speaker:

Ms. Raspberry Simpson

Affiliation:

PhD Candidate, Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

When:

Thursday, February 17, 2022 at 11:00:00 AM   Add to Calendar

Where:

Boggs Building, Room 3-47

Host:

Dan Kotlyar
dan.kotlyar@me.gatech.edu

Abstract

A new class of multi-kilojoule, multi-picosecond short-pulse lasers such as NIF-ARC, OMEGA-EP, LMJ-PETAL and LFEX-GEKKO, enable exciting opportunities to produce high-brightness, high-energy laser-driven particle sources for applications in high-energy-density science. Recent results on these platforms have demonstrated enhanced accelerated proton energies and electron temperatures when compared to established scaling laws. Motivated by these results, this work examines laser-driven proton and electron acceleration in the multi-picosecond regime (>1ps) at laser intensities of 1017 – 1019 W/cm2. A detailed scaling study was performed on the TITAN laser at the Jupiter Laser Facility and found that the accelerated electrons and maximum proton energies exceeded the ponderomotive scaling in the multi-picosecond regime. The results are consistent with the accelerating sheath field being established by the super-ponderomotive electron population, rather than ponderomotive. A new analytical scaling is presented to reflect this enhancement in accelerated particle characteristics in this laser parameter regime. In addition to the advancement of multi-kilojoule laser systems, high-intensity (>10^18 W/cm^2) short-pulse (

Biography

Raspberry Simpson is a PhD Candidate in the Nuclear Science and Engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the High-Intensity Laser Science Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where her graduate work focuses on the characterization and development of laser-driven particle beams. Prior to beginning her graduate studies, Raspberry worked in the Physics Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico developing neutron imaging diagnostics for inertial confinement fusion experiments and electron radiography for material science studies. She received her undergraduate degree at Columbia University in Applied Physics and is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and NNSA Laboratory Residency Graduate Fellowship.