Towards Proton Tomography of Laser-Plasma Interactions*

Proton radiography, similarly to many diagnostics, probes a plasma in a line-integrated fashion.

Analytical techniques for proton radiographs have advanced significantly in recent years and reliable

recovery of integrated deflections is now possible, along with separation of the electric and magnetic

fields’ contributions to those deflections. Here, we propose the application of tomographic methods

to the proton radiography diagnostic and present two pre-processing stages which vastly improve

the performance of standard tomographic algorithms in the limit of very few probe directions and

highly elongated field structures respectively. These methods improve the practical applicability of

common tomographic algorithms to proton radiography and therefore the feasibility of deducing

three-dimensional magnetic field structures in plasma.