Ion acceleration driven by superintense laser pulses is attracting an impressive and steadily
increasing effort. Motivations can be found in the applicative potential and in the perspective …

For many years, laser-driven ion acceleration, mainly proton acceleration, has been
proposed and a number of proof-of-principle experiments have been carried out with lasers …

Laser plasma-based particle accelerators attract great interest in fields where conventional
accelerators reach limits based on size, cost or beam parameters. Despite the fact that …

The advent of ultraintense laser pulses generated by the technique of chirped pulse
amplification (CPA) along with the development of high-fluence laser materials has opened …

The charge separation effects in the collisionless plasma expansion into a vacuum are
studied in great detail. Accurate results are obtained concerning the structure of the ion front …

We present experimental studies on ion acceleration from ultrathin diamondlike carbon foils
irradiated by ultrahigh contrast laser pulses of energy 0.7 J focused to peak intensities of 5× …

A new regime is described for radiation pressure acceleration of a thin foil by an intense
laser beam of above 10 20 W cm− 2. Highly monoenergetic proton beams extending to giga …

Rapid progress in the development of high-intensity laser systems has extended our ability
to study light–matter interactions far into the relativistic domain, in which electrons are driven …

The use of an intense collimated beam of protons produced by a high-intensity laser pulse
interacting with a plasma for the proton treatment of oncological diseases is discussed. The …

Ultracold neutral plasmas formed by photoionizing laser-cooled atoms near the ionization
threshold have electron temperatures in the 1–1000K range and ion temperatures from tens …