Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Laser-plasma based accelerators, where a high intensity laser interacts with a solid target, represent a promising concept for compact and cost-efficient ion sources.
As the acceleration takes place on ultra-fast timescales and very small spatial scales of only a few µm, information about the acceleration processes in the plasma are generally derived indirectly, e.g. through particle or radiation diagnostics. Optical probing techniques however can give direct access to the plasma dynamics on the fs to ps timescale.
In this poster we will present pump-probe experiments performed at the high-intensity laser DRACO at the HZDR, Germany. Seeking information about the conditions of the critical density surface in the plasma, we simply image the probe reflected from the target surface without doing tomography. The curvature of the reflecting critical surface translates into characteristic angular patterns in the reflected probe beam which can be traced back to the original surface shape using a ray-tracing model of the experiment.
In our experiments, the pump beam was the 150 TW DRACO beam with a pulse length of 30 fs and a central wavelength of 800 nm. The probe beam was derived from the mean beam, frequency doubled, and had a pulse duration of ~100fs. Both beams were synchronized and the probe could be delayed with respect to the main beam with a resolution of ~200 fs. The imaging of the probe was performed with a large-aperture objective yielding a high spatial resolution of ~2µm.
As a result, we compared the critical surface deformation and dynamics for different target materials (metal and silicon) and target shapes, observing a strong influence of the lateral target size.