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12LARGE SCALE 3D SIMULATIONS OF PROTON ACCELERATION BY INTENSE FEMTOSECOND LASER IRRADIATING TARGET WITH NANOSCALE SURFACE GRATING
12 1 1 12 Artem Korzhimanov ' , Igor Surmin , Sergey Bastrakov , Evgeny Efimenko ' ,
Arkady Gonoskov1,2,3, Mattias Marklund3, and Iosif B. Meyerov1
1 Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Institute of Apllied Physics RAS, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia 3 Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenberg, Sweden
In this work we are investigating a problem of ion acceleration by ultrashort superintense laser pulses irradiating thin solid targets. It is known that for laser intensities of 18 20 2 the order of 10 -1020 W/cm2 the
most efficient acceleration method is a so-called Target Normal Sheath Acceleration (TNSA) which is based on the idea to accelerate ions from a rare side of the target. The acceleration force in this method is created by laser-heated electrons passing through the target and forming electrostatic sheath on the rare side. The overall energy efficiency of the method is, however, usually doesn't exceed few percent. One of the ways to increase it is to increase coupling of laser radiation to target electrons. For this purpose recently it has been proposed to use nanoscale inhomogeneities (nanograting) on the irradiated side of the target [1]. So far, theoretical studies of this problem were mostly limited to 2-dimensional geometry [2-4]. In a 3-dimensional case 2-D rectangular grating refers to a so-called nano-brush. However, grating can be modulated in perpendicular direction as well. So one can imagine other possible rectangular nanostructures, namely, nano-dots and nano-rods. A goal of our work is to compare these structures in terms of the ion acceleration efficiency. This demands full-scale 3-dimensional simulations which were performed by PICADOR code developed recently in our group. Simulations of ultra-intense laser-plasma interaction are usually based on coupled relativistic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code treating plasma and fully electrodynamic Maxwell solver treating electromagnetic fields. PICADOR code implements this scheme in fully 3-dimensional geometry. The code is one of the few which has been parallelized to work on heterogeneous cluster systems using all available computing power from both CPUs and GPUs [5]. The code is rather new and the investigation of the problem allows us also to measure the efficiency of the code in real situation.
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