Stable Laser-Driven Proton Beam Acceleration from a Two-Ion-Species Ultrathin Foil

By using multidimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we present a new regime of stable proton beam acceleration which takes place when a two-ion-species shaped foil is illuminated by a circularly polarized laser pulse. In the simulations, the lighter protons are nearly instantaneously separated from the heavier carbon ions due to the charge-to-mass ratio difference. The heavy ion layer expands in space and acts to buffer the proton layer from the Rayleigh-Taylor-like (RT) instability that would have otherwise degraded the proton beam acceleration. A simple three-interface model is formulated to explain qualitatively the stable acceleration of the light ions. In the absence of the RT instability, the high quality monoenergetic proton bunch persists even after the laser-foil interaction ends.