We showed in a previous paper [1] that a plastic micro-cone target can be used to enhance the intensity of a focused laser pulse higher than one order of magnitude from
the initial value of 8x1020 W/cm2 by performing two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations.
In this study, we perform three-dimensional PIC simulations for the interaction of a 10 PW focused laser pulse with a plastic micro-cone target with the height of 10 µm.
The initial laser pulse intensity is 1023 W/cm2 .
We obtain for different micro-cone tip diameters an intensification higher than 20 times as can be seen in Figure 1. We plotted also in Figure 1 the intensification for the foil
targets with different thicknesses. We can see that the laser pulse is intensified more than twice by the micro-cone in comparison with the foil. Figure 2 shows us that the laser pulse is shortened by the micro-cone from 16 optical cycles to 9 optical cycles.
Therefore, micro-cone targets can be used as optical devices for guiding, intensifying, and shortening a 10 PW laser pulse without refurbishing the
laser system.
[1] O. Budriga, L. E. Ionel, D. Tatomirescu and K. A. Tanaka, Opt. Lett. 45, 3454 (2020)