Investigation on Plasma Based High Energy Proton Acceleration

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The goal of this project is to develop a proton accelerator utilizing an interaction of a plasma with a high intensity, ultrashort laser pulse, which is expected to be more compact than the conventional accelerators. We have proposed two proton acceleration methods. The possibility of proton acceleration due to both the V_P x B and the wakefield has been confirmed by performing numerical simulations. Although the energy increment per stage is not large, the acceleration gradient is several hundred times larger than that in the conventional rf acceleration scheme. There seems to be some room for making improvements including new acceleration schemes. More detailed discussions are required for further improvement of the acceleration efficiency. We are going to develop a proton source with an output energy as high as 1 MeV for the proof-of-principle experiments of the proton acceleration methods. Development of the proton source with the energy 30 keV was finished so far. In order to accelerate protons with energy 30 keV extracted from the proton source up to 1 MeV, we are under designing IH (Interdigital H-mode) linear accelerator as the injector to the final stage of the accelerator which uses laser and plasma. At present, we are considering the design parameters including the cavity structure by using computer simulations, such as MAFIA. We plan to make prototype accelerator after finishing the design of the IH accelerator cavity.