Ponderomotive ion acceleration in dense plasmas at super-high laser intensities

Short laser pulses at super-high intensities such as those proposed in the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project open new prospects for efficient acceleration of ions in overdense plasmas. A simple analytical model and numerical simulations demonstrate that pulses with intensities exceeding 1022 W/cm2 may efficiently accelerate ions to high energies up to a few GeV. Maximum ion energy and the energy spectrum of the accelerated ions can be tuned by an appropriate choice of laser pulse intensity and duration at a given plasma density distribution. (authors)