P. L. Shkolnikov

Lasers As Particle Accelerators In Medicine: From Laser‐Driven Protons To Imaging With Thomson Sources

We report our recent progress using a high‐power, picosecond CO2 laser for Thomson scattering and ion acceleration experiments. These experiments capitalize on certain advantages of long‐wavelength CO2 lasers, such as their high number of photons per energy unit and beneficial wavelength‐ scaling of the electrons’ ponderomotive energy and critical plasma frequency. High X‐ray fluxes produced in the interactions of the counter‐propagating laser‐ and electron‐beams for obtaining single‐shot, high‐contrast images of biological objects. The laser, focused on a hydrogen jet, generated a monoenergetic proton beam via the radiation‐pressure mechanism. The energy of protons produced by this method scales linearly with the laser’s intensity. We present a plan for scaling the process into the range of 100‐MeV proton energy via upgrading the CO2 laser. This development will enable an advance to the laser‐driven proton cancer therapy.

Proton and Ion Acceleration by an Ultrafast TW CO 2 Laser: Proof-of-Principle Experiments

Results on proton acceleration by an ultrashort TW CO2 laser interacting with Al foils show proton energy spectra substantially different from those obtained with solid-state lasers, due to the lasers different wavelength and polarization.

Radiation efficiency of water-window Cherenkov sources using atomic shell resonances

We developed simple theory of Cherenkov radiation at atomic resonances in the X-ray water window for L-shells in 5 trans-oxigen elements and proposed K-shell resonance in liquid nitrogen. Our results compare favorably with experimental data

Relativistic synchrotron radiation pulse

Synchrotron radiation by a single rotating electron and by an electron cloud in a lasetron is considered in the Heaviside-Feynman approach, which yields simple analytical solutions for the temporal shape of radiation pulses.

High-intensity sources of hard X-rays and MeV y-photons: feasibility, new physics, applications

Recent theoretical and experimental study of plasma driven by high-intensity ultrafast lasers have demonstrated generation of substantial amounts of relativistic electrons with energies in MeV range, see e.g. [1,2].