Laser ion acceleration via dipole vortex formation

Nakamura, Tatsufumi; Esirkepov, T. Z.; Koga, J. K.; Bulanov, S. V.

Laser ion acceleration has been intensively studied in may institute from the perspective of medical applications. One of the critical issue is to enhance the accelerated ion energy. For that purpose, using a near-critical density target is considered to be beneficial due to the high coupling of laser energy to plasmas. In this research, we studied ion acceleration by using formation of dipole magnetic vortex. The behavior of dipole vortex is complicated, but by controlling them, intense electric field could be induced inside the plasma. We show how to control them and obtain the energy scaling by vortex acceleration.