Generation of high energy laser-driven electron and proton sources with the 200 TW system VEGA 2 at the Centro de Laseres Pulsados
physics.plasm-ph
/ Authors
L. Volpe, R. Fedosejevs, G. Gatti, J. A. Pérez-Hernández, C. Méndez, J. Apiñaniz, X. Vaisseau, C. Salgado, M. Huault, S. Malko
and 16 more authors
G. Zeraouli, V. Ospina, A. Longman, D. De Luis, K. Li, O. Varela, E. García, I. Hernández, J. D. Pisonero, J. García Ajates, J. M. Alvarez, C. García, M. Rico, D. Arana, J. Hernández-Toro, L. Roso
/ Abstract
The Centro de Laseres Pulsados in Salamanca Spain has recently started operation phase and the first User access period on the 6 J 30 fs 200 TW system (VEGA 2) already started at the beginning of 2018. In this paper we report on two commissioning experiments recently performed on the VEGA 2 system in preparation for the user campaign. VEGA 2 system has been tested in different configurations depending on the focusing optics and targets used. One configuration (long focal length f=130 cm) is for under-dense laser-matter interaction where VEGA 2 is focused onto a low density gas-jet generating electron beams (via laser wake field acceleration mechanism) with maximum energy up to 500 MeV and an X-ray betatron source with a 10 keV critical energy. A second configuration (short focal length f=40 cm) is for over-dense laser-matter interaction where VEGA 2 is focused onto an 5 microns thick Al target generating a proton beam with a maximum energy of 10 MeV and average energy of 7-8 MeV and temperature of 2.5 MeV. In this paper we present preliminary experimental results.