Generation of high-quality mega-electron volt proton beams with intense-laser-driven nanotube accelerator

An ion acceleration scheme using carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is proposed, in which embedded fragments of low-Z materials are irradiated by an ultrashort intense laser to eject substantial numbers of electrons. Due to the resultant characteristic electrostatic field, the nanotube and embedded materials play the roles of the barrel and bullets of a gun, respectively, to produce highly collimated and quasimonoenergetic ion beams. Three-dimensional particle simulations, that take all the two-body Coulomb interactions into account, demonstrate generation of quasimonoenergetic MeV-order proton beams using nanometer-size CNT under a super-intense electrostatic field ∼1014 V m−1.