Proton acceleration by radially polarized chirped laser pulses

Abstract

Within the framework of plane-wave angular spectrum analysis of electromagnetic fields, a solution for the field of a tightly focused radially polarized (RP) chirped laser pulse is presented. With this solution, direct laser acceleration of protons by this kind of RP laser pulses is investigated numerically. It is found that a RP laser pulse with proper negative frequency chirps can lead to efficient proton acceleration, reaching sub-GeV at the laser intensity of 10^{22} W/cm^{2} from its injection energy of 45 MeV.