Conveners
Secondary Beam Production I
- Louise Willingale (University of Michigan)
The evolution of laser and accelerator technologies has taken a new turn, giving rise to a new transdisciplinary field: Nuclear Photonics. Advances in high-intensity laser technologies have made it possible to accelerate electrons in the GeV class and protons close to 100 MeV from a distance of less than 1 mm. In particular, secondary beams such as laser-driven neutron sources (LDNS) are...
Generation of neutrons from laser-based sources has been the focus of research and development for over two decades. The first step towards generating fusion neutrons is to accelerate ions with sufficient kinetic energy to overcome the repulsive Coulomb potential. So far, most of the ion acceleration experiments have been carried out using multi-cycle, Joule-class lasers. Although the number...
Ultra-intense and well collimated gamma and particle beams in the Mega-electronvolt range are of interest for many applications in fundamental research as well as medical and technical applications. For example, in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and in general nuclear fusion research, diagnostic tools are needed which allows to investigate as well as control plasma processes. Laser induced...
We report the creation of super-high-flux gamma-rays with energy >8 MeV and photo-neutrons via the ($\gamma$,n) reaction near giant dipole resonance energies (8 - 20 MeV), using the ~130 J Texas Petawatt laser to irradiate high-Z (Au, Pt, Re, W) targets of mm - cm thickness, at laser intensities up to ~5x10$^{21}$ W/cm$^2$ . We detected up to ~ several x 10$^{12}$ gamma-rays >8 MeV (~3% of...
