Acceleration in vacuum of bare nuclei by tightly focused radially polarized laser light.
Fields of a radially polarized petawatt laser beam, represented by a truncated series in the diffraction angle epsilon to order epsilon15 and focused to subwavelength waist radius, are shown to accelerate protons and bare nuclei to several hundred MeV per nucleon over a distance equivalent to a few laser wavelengths.
Salamin
Yousef I
YI
Physics Department, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. ysalamin@aus.edu