Emittance Characterization of Ion Beams Provided by Laser Plasma

Abstract

Laser ion sources offer the possibility to obtain ion beams useful for particle accelerators. Nanosecond pulsed lasers at intensities of the order of 10⁸ W/cm², interacting with solid matter in a vacuum, produce plasma of high temperature and high density. To increase the ion energy, an external post-acceleration system can be employed by means of high voltage power supplies of some tens of kV. In this work, we characterize the ion beams provided by an LIS source and post-accelerated. We calculated the produced charge and the emittance. Applying 60 kV of accelerating voltage and laser irradiance of 0.1 GW/cm² on the Cu target, we obtain 5.5 mA of output current and normalized beam emittance of 0.2 mm mrad. The brightness of the beams was 137 mA (mm mrad)⁻².