Study on magnetic field generation and electron collimation in overdense plasmas

Abstract

An analytical fluid model is proposed for artificially collimating fast electron beams produced in interaction of ultraintense laser pulses with specially engineered sandwich structure targets. The theory reveals that in low-density-core structure targets, the magnetic field is generated by the rapid change of the flow velocity of the background electrons in transverse direction (perpendicular to the flow velocity) caused by the density jump. It is found that the spontaneously generated magnetic field reaches as high as 100 MG, which is large enough to collimate fast electron transport in overdense plasmas. This theory is also supported by numerical simulations performed using a two-dimensional particle-in-cell code. It is found that the simulation results agree well with the theoretical analysis.