Commissioning of a compact laser-based proton beam line for high intensity bunches around 10 MeV

• Main Authors: S. Busold, D. Schumacher, O. Deppert, C. Brabetz, F. Kroll, A. Blažević, V. Bagnoud, M. Roth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society 2014-03-01
• Series: Physical Review Special Topics. Accelerators and Beams
• Online Access: http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.17.031302

We report on the first results of experiments with a new laser-based proton beam line at the GSI accelerator facility in Darmstadt. It delivers high current bunches at proton energies around 9.6 MeV, containing more than 10^{9} particles in less than 10 ns and with tunable energy spread down to 2.7% (ΔE/E_{0} at FWHM). A target normal sheath acceleration stage serves as a proton source and a pulsed solenoid provides for beam collimation and energy selection. Finally a synchronous radio frequency (rf) field is applied via a rf cavity for energy compression at a synchronous phase of -90  deg. The proton bunch is characterized at the end of the very compact beam line, only 3 m behind the laser matter interaction point, which defines the particle source.