A study of laser wakefield for carbon ions

Plasma laser wakefield acceleration has been proved to have several advantages over the conventional radio frequency (RF) accelerators. Although there are many successful efforts in electron acceleration, there has been very little literature on heavy ion acceleration such as carbon ions by laser wakefield. Therefore, we have studied, by numerical simulations, the possibility of applying this particular technique to negative carbon ion C. We used particle-in-cell method to calculate the energy which C can gain in some cases, and we studied some limits to acceleration to understand the results as well as discuss prospective study. (author)