Monoenergetic hard X-ray emission from carbon-nanotube-array coated targets with femtosecond laser pulses

Okano, Yasuaki*; Nishikino, Masaharu; Nakahara, Shogo*; Tokita, Shigeki*; Masuno, Shinichiro*; Hashida, Masaki*; Sakabe, Shuji*; Nakano, Hidetoshi*; Kawachi, Tetsuya; Nishimura, Hiroaki*; Mima, Kunioki*

The generation of monoenergetic hard X-rays more than 10 keV has attracted much attention for X-ray imaging in the field of high density physics and biomedical applications. Our group is currently developing an X-ray microbeam system to study radiobiological effects of cells as fundamental study of radiation therapy. In such applications, improvement of conversion efficiency (CE) from the driving laser to X-rays is an important issue and some approaches for efficient X-ray generation up to several keV have been proposed so far using low density, surface-structured targets, such as porous metals, velvet targets, and carbon nanotubes (CNTs), with the concepts of improvement of the laser absorption efficiency. In this work, we investigated the yields of K-alpha emission from bare and aligned CNT-array coated metal targets to take baseline data aiming to improve the CE in hard X-ray region (multi-keV to tens of keV) by adapting such kind of method.