Influence of target curvature on the characteristics of particle beams generated by laser ion acceleration with microstructured enhanced targets at ultra high intensity

Following the advances in laser science that have been performed recently, the push to improve the quality of the laser generated particle beams has seen a lot of interest in the past decade. The work presented in this paper aims to study the role of target curvature using 2D PIC simulations to ascertain its influence on the angular spread and peak energy for the accelerated proton beam, and the characteristics of the gamma photons produced for potential usage as secondary sources. For the scope of this work we parametrically probed different curvature radii of a microstructured enhanced target impacted by a laser pulse with predetermined parameters. This paper continues past studies (Tatomirescu et al 2017 AIP Conf. Proc. 1796 020013; Tatomirescu et al 2017 AIP Conf. Proc. 1916 030002) and concentrates on determining the target curvature effect when using conical structures for pulse focusing. The results show promising enhanced focus of the accelerated particles and an enhancement of the peak energy of the accelerated particles.