Department of ION acceleration AND APPLICATIONS OF HIGH ENERGY PARTICLES

The Department of Ion Acceleration and Applications of High Energy Particles focus is generation of laser-plasma based ion sources and demonstration of proof-of-principle experiments aimed at envisioning future societal applications in multidisciplinary areas with special attention paid to biomedical ones (ELIMED. Thus, the optimization of particle beam quality and reproducibility (spatial profile, pointing, divergence and energy stability) is a priority of the Department scientific agenda, trying to fulfill the expectations of the scientific user community which are summarized in the ELI-White Book.

Laser-driven particle acceleration is a novel field of physics that is rapidly evolving thanks to the continuing development of high power laser systems, thus allowing researchers to investigate the interaction of relativistic laser intensities (> 10¹⁹ W/cm²) with matter. As a result of such interaction, extremely high electric and magnetic fields are generated. Such tremendous fields, which can be supported only in a plasma, allow for the acceleration of particles by way of very compact approaches. In particular, spectacular progress in the acceleration of protons through energy transfer from relativistic electrons in thin solid targets has been achieved [Macchi et al, currently leading to record proton energies around 100-MeV [Higginson et al.