Plasma Neutralized Drift Compression and Final Focus of Heavy Ion Beams

In order to drive an inertial fusion target or study high energy density physics with heavy ion beams, the beam radius must be focused to small radius and the pulselength must be greatly compressed. The conventional scheme for temporal pulse compression makes use of an increasing ion velocity to compress the beam as it drifts and beam space charge to stagnate the compression before final focus. Beam compression in a neutralizing plasma does not require stagnation of the compression, enabling a more robust method