Plasma block acceleration under ultraintense laser pulse

In order to overcome the space charge influence over the transport of the high-current particle beams in laser acceleration, we propose a new scheme to realize the acceleration of a neutral plasma block. It is carried out by injecting an ultraintense laser pulse with intensity about 10²² W/cm² and pulse duration about 5T (T is laser period) upon two thin solid-density plasma blocks. By optimizing the plasma parameters, we have obtained an accelerated plasma block, which is almost neutral and propagates for a quite long distance in the space. The ion and electron energies are of GeV and 100 MeV magnitude respectively. (authors)