Investigation of relativistic plasmas produced by irradiating micrometer-sized solid-density hydrogen and argon droplets with ultraintense laser pulses

超强激光脉冲与物质的相互作用允许产生对各种基础跨学科研究领域都有利的条件，这些领域包括建模天体物理对象，例如巨行星和低质量恒星的内部，或开发用于癌症治疗的紧凑型质子加速器或作为核物理应用的注射器。然而，这需要在Gbar压力下产生物质或将质子加速到非常高的能量，但这迄今为止在实验上证明具有挑战性，特别是因为在微观水平上控制上述现象的机制仍然知之甚少。在这里，我们将采用微米级的氢和氩液滴从层流液体射流作为理想的，质量有限的目标，相对于上述主题的相对论激光等离子体产生的新的研究。更具体地说，所使用的液滴的独特特征和来自两个不同高功率激光系统的激光脉冲的独特特征在超过两个数量级的能量范围内的结合将使我们能够一方面推进我们对物质的认识在高能量密度区域，另一方面，大大改善激光产生的光束特征，从而为实现下一阶段桌面级质子加速器铺平了道路。

The interaction of ultraintense laser pulses with matter allows producing conditions that are rele-vant to a variety of fundamental interdisciplinary research fields, which include modeling astrophysical objects such the interior of giant planets and low mass stars, or the development of compact proton accelerators for cancer therapy or as injectors for nuclear physics applications. However, this requires producing matter at Gbar pressures or accelerating the protons to very high energies, but this has so far proven experimentally challenging, especially because the mechanisms that govern the above phenomena at the microscopic levels are still poorly understood. Here, we will employ micrometer-sized hydrogen and argon droplets from a laminar liquid jet as ideal, mass-limited targets for novel studies of relativistic laser-plasma generation with respect to the above topics. More specifically, the combination of the unique features of the em-ployed droplets and of laser pulses from two different high-power laser systems in an energy range over more than two orders of magnitude will allow us, on the one side, advancing our knowledge of matter in the high energy density regime and, on the other side, greatly improving the laser-generated beam features, thus paving the way for the realization of next-stage tabletop-scale proton accelerators.