Data for "Selective Ion Acceleration by Intense Radiation Pressure"

The data here is used in the publication "Selective Ion Acceleration by Intense Radiation Pressure". The experiment focuses on the demonstration of Light-Sail Radiation Pressure Acceleration of ultra-thin foils when using circularly polarised pulses. Furthermore, the preferential acceleration of bulk carbon over contaminant protons is observed and a species dependent acceleration mechanism inferred and verified by numerical simulations.

The raw data, the ion spectra from the laser axis Thomson Parabola Spectrometer (TPS), is used to create figures 1 and 2 where the maximum ion energy dependence with target thickness and laser intensity is investigated respectively. The experimental data is overlaid with the simulation data – using the open-source Particle in Cell (PIC) code EPOCH – and the input files are shown here.

The experimental_data.csv file contains the information relating to the shot number including target thickness, laser polarisation and laser energy (before compressor). The shot number is then used in the file name for the data. The simulations were performed on the Kelvin cluster at QUB and SCARF at RAL. EPOCH was compiled with gcc-9.3.0 and OpenMPI 4.0.4 in both instances. EPOCH is available from the git repository:

https://github.com/Warwick-Plasma/epoch

2D PIC was used to understand the underlying physics of the interaction. As discussed in the paper, the laser contrast preceding the main pulse was also modelled. The inputs for the target thickness along with this pulse profile are in the folder ‘simulation_data/coherent_contrast/thickness_scan’ where the name of the input file is the target thickness. The folder ‘simulation_data/coherent_contrast/intensity_scan_15nm’ contains several files with a constant target thickness and a varying peak intensity where the filename is the peak intensity.

A second folder called ‘simulation_data/prepulse’ contains the input files used for the prepulse simulations used in figure 3 of the paper. The intensity of the pre-pulse together with the delay is used in the filename. For example, a 1 × 10^{17} W/cm2 prepulse 2ps before the main pulse is labelled as: “1E17_2ps.deck”