Acceleration characteristics of hot electrons resulted from magnetic reconnection process driven by double-beam intense laser pulses in near critical density plasmas.

In this work, we investigated the magnetic annihilation and reconnection and the resulted hot electron acceleration driven by double-beam intense laser pulses in two-layer near critical density (NCD) plasma target. The results are obtained by performing two-dimensional (2D) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. It is found that a quasi-mono-energetic peak can be formed in the energy spectrum of electrons accelerated by the process of magnetic field annihilation (MA) at cutoff energy. Electron spectra feature depends on the length of the second low-density layer. This suggests that the process of relativistic magnetic annihilation may be controlled in experiments by target design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]