https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/s10053-025-00977-0
Regular Article - Ultraintense and Ultrashort Laser Fields
High-energy proton beam generation via combined radiation pressure acceleration and laser wakefield acceleration in modulated plasma channels
1
School of Physics and Astronomy, China West Normal University, 637009, Nanchong, People’s Republic of China
2
Panzhihua No.3 Senior High School, 617099, Panzhihua, Sichuan Province, People’s Republic of China
3
School of Science, Sun Yat-sen University, 518107, Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China
4
Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, People’s Republic of China
a
lan-x-f@163.com
b
huangysh59@mail.sysu.edu.cn
c
y-f-he@foxmail.com
Received:
11
December
2024
Accepted:
5
March
2025
Published online:
2
April
2025
High-energy proton beams are essential for fundamental research and applied physics. The combined acceleration mechanism based on radiation pressure acceleration has made great progress in obtaining high-energy protons. However, Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI) is still a potential influencing factor that will limit the quality of high-energy proton beams. Different from the previous suppression and neglect of RTI, this paper introduces a parabolic density plasma channel to accelerate protons by virtue of the characteristics of RTI. Three-dimensional Particle-in-cell simulations reveal that this scheme achieves high-energy protons with cut-off energy of 39 
, total charge of 0.97 
, and the emittance of 1.12 
in both the y and z directions. There are locally distributed electrons in the parabolic density plasma channel, and the focusing field around them can effectively focus protons. Compared with the uniform density plasma channel, the parabolic density plasma channel can significantly improve the quality of the proton beam, which could offer significant guidance for the generation and application of high-energy proton beams.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, SIF and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
