Isochoric heating of materials with intense ion pulses at the BELLA petawatt laser*

We use the BELLA petawatt laser [1] to accelerate ions to multi-MeV energies at a repetition rate of up to 1 Hz [2]. Ion acceleration is now routinely conducted at BELLA in parallel to laser-plasma acceleration of electrons. For laser intensities in the 10^19 W/cm^2 regime, we find ion intensities up to 10^12 ions/shot with low divergence. When transported to a second target, ion pulses can drive the formation and annealing dynamics of defects and they can uniformly heat materials to temperatures of 1-10 eV, well into the warm dense matter regime [3]. Ion intensities can be tuned for materials processing at selected temperatures to form desired defect structures or to drive desired phase-transitions. We present results from ion acceleration and target heating campaigns, including color center synthesis for spin qubits in diamond.
[1] K. Nakamura et al., IEEE J. Quant. Electr. 53, 1200121 (2017)
[2] S. Steinke, et al., submitted
[3] J. J. Barnard, T. Schenkel, J. Appl. Phys. 122, 195901 (2017)