Laser-to-proton energy transfer efficiency in laser-plasma interactions

摘要

It is shown that the energy of protons accelerated in laser-matterinteraction experiments may be significantly increased through the process ofsplitting the incoming laser pulse into multiple interaction stages of equalintensity. From a thermodynamic point of view, the splitting procedure can beviewed as an effective way of increasing the efficiency of energy transfer fromthe laser light to protons, which peaks for processes having the least amountof entropy gain. It is predicted that it should be possible to achieve $\apprge100%$ increase in the energy efficiency in a six-stage laser proton acceleratorcompared to a single laser-target interaction scheme.