The proposed ‘fission-fusion’ reaction mechanism aims at investigating the rapid neutron-capture process, contributing to the formation of heavy elements, by using laser-accelerated thorium ions in a sandwich target configuration [1]. In a first step, the efficient acceleration of gold ions is investigated, as recently achieved in our measurement at the PHELIX laser with 500 fs long pulses [2]. In this experiment, for the first time, the laser-based acceleration of gold ions above 7 MeV/u was demonstrated. Additionally, individual gold charge states were resolved with unprecedent resolution. This allowed to investigate the role of collisional ionization using a developmental branch of the particle-in-cell simulation code EPOCH [3], showing a much better agreement of the simulated charge state distributions with the experimentally measured ones than when only considering field ionization. This work is continued at the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA), using the ATLAS 3000 laser (800 nm central wavelength, 25 fs pulse length).
[1] D. Habs et al., Appl. Phys. B 103, 471-484 (2011)
[2] F.H. Lindner et al., Sci. Rep. 12, 4784 (2022)
[3] M. Afshari et al., Sci. Rep. 12, 18260 (2022)
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