Eur. Phys. J. D (2014) 68: 30
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2013-40576-4

Regular Article

Effects of buried high-Z layers on fast electron propagation

¹ College of Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, P.R. China
² State Key Lab of High Performance Computing, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, P.R. China
³ School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK
⁴ Institute of Physics of the ASCR, ELI-Beamlines project, Na Slovance 2, 18221 Prague, Czech Republic

^a e-mail: m.borghesi@qub.ac.uk

Received: 17 September 2013
Received in final form: 6 November 2013
Published online: 13 February 2014

Abstract

By extending a prior model [A.R. Bell, J.R. Davies, S.M. Guerin, Phys. Rev. E 58, 2471 (1998)], the magnetic field generated during the transport of a fast electron beam driven by an ultraintense laser in a solid target is derived analytically and applied to estimate the effect of such field on fast electron propagation through a buried high-Z layer in a lower-Z target. It is found that the effect gets weaker with the increase of the depth of the buried layer, the divergence of the fast electrons, and the laser intensity, indicating that magnetic field effects on the fast electron divergence as measured from K_a X-ray emission may need to be considered for moderate laser intensities. On the basis of the calculations, some considerations are made on how one can mitigate the effect of the magnetic field generated at the interface.