Sergio BETTI, Carlo A. CECCHETTI, Andrea GAMUCCI, Antonio GIULIETTI, Danilo
GIULIETTI, Petra KOESTER, Luca LABATE, Tadzio LEVATO, Leonida A. GIZZI
Flavio ZAMPONI, Andrea LUBCKE, Tino KAMPFER, Ingo USCHMANN, and Eckhart FORSTER

LASER-ACCELERATED PROTON YIELD CONTROL VIA REAR-SURFACE TARGET COATING

IPCF Internal Report no. 1/2008

Laser-driven acceleration of protons up to energies of 3:5 MeV and with a beam half-angle diver-
gence of 10deg has been observed by irradiating multi-layer targets of different thickness and material
with 70 fs, 600 mJ Ti:Sa laser pulses. The experimental results suggest that target rear-surface
coating with hydrogen rich material may significantly increase the accelerated proton yield and col-
limation. The observations are in a qualitative agreement with the numerical results obtained with
a Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code.