Simulating Multi-Scale Physics in Solid Target Laser-Ion Acceleration

Laser-ion acceleration from solid targets with ultra-intense laser pulses on the fs time scale is a central research topic for next generation particle accelerators. Accompanying processes are highly non-linear and require precise knowledge about the influence of both ab-initio electro-magnetic and atomic evolution of the plasma.

Consequently, modeling the acceleration process with simulations does not only require kinetic models with very high resolution (from the order of the inverse plasma frequency to the ns acceleration process) but also self-consistent models for non-equilibrium plasma and ionization processes.

We present large scale, 3D3V simulations with the fully-relativistic particle-in-cell code PIConGPU on the ORNL Titan cluster of mass-limited droplet targets related to recent experiments levitating these in Paul-traps.
In comparison with large 2D surveys the dependence of plasma instabilities and resulting ion energies under the variation of target material and laser properties is shown.