Dortmund 2021 – scientific programme

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AKBP: Arbeitskreis Beschleunigerphysik

AKBP 4: New Accelerator Concepts and Hadron Accelerators

AKBP 4.6: Talk

Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 17:45–18:00, AKBPa

Commissioning of the laser-driven ion acceleration beamline at the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications — •Jens Hartmann, Thomas Rösch, Luisa Tischendorf, Leonard Doyle, Lotta Flaig, Marc Berndl, Felix Balling, Sonja Gerlach, and Jörg Schreiber — Department of Medical Physics, Faculty of Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universtität München

The Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) in Garching near Munich features the ATLAS-3000 laser system, which can deliver up to 3 PW within a pulse duration of 20 fs. It is the driver for the Laser-driven ION (LION) beamline, which aims to accelerate protons and carbon ions for applications. A 20 degrees off-axis parabolic mirror with a focal length of 1.5 m focusses the 28 cm diameter laser-beam down to a micrometre-sized spot, where a vacuum-compatible wave-front sensor is used for a deformable mirror feedback loop focus optimization. Commissioning started mid 2019 with regular proton acceleration using nm-thin plastic foils as targets. The amount of light traveling backwards from the experiment into the laser is constantly monitored and currently limits safe operation to 5 J on target. Protons with a kinetic energy of 12 MeV are stably accelerated with the given laser parameters and are suitable for transport with permanent magnet quadrupoles towards our application platform 1.8 m downstream of the source. We have performed parameter scans varying target thicknesses and laser-pulse shape to optimize for highest and most stable proton numbers at 12 MeV kinetic energy, and investigated shot-to-shot particle number stability for the best parameters.