Neutron imaging with the short-pulse laser driven neutron source at the Trident laser facility.

Emerging approaches to short-pulse laser-driven neutron production offer a possible gateway to compact, low cost, and intense broad spectrum sources for a wide variety of applications. They are based on energetic ions, driven by an intense short-pulse laser, interacting with a converter material to produce neutrons via breakup and nuclear reactions. Recent experiments performed with the high-contrast laser at the Trident laser facility of Los Alamos National Laboratory have demonstrated a laser-driven ion acceleration mechanism operating in the regime of relativistic transparency, featuring a volumetric laser-plasma interaction. This mechanism is distinct from previously studied ones that accelerate ions at the laser-target surface. The Trident experiments produced an intense beam of deuterons with an energy distribution extending above 100MeV. This deuteron beam, when directed at a beryllium converter, produces a forward-directed neutron beam with ~5 ? 10⁹ n/sr, in a single laser shot, primarily due to deuteron breakup. The neutron beam has a pulse duration on the order of a few nanoseconds with an energy distribution extending from a few hundreds of keV to almost 80MeV. For the experiments on neutron-source spot-size measurements, our gated neutron imager was setup to select neutrons in the energy range of 2.5-35 MeV. The spot size of neutron emission at the converter was measured by two different imaging techniques, using a knife-edge and a penumbral aperture, in two different experimental campaigns. The neutronsource spot size is measured 1mm for both experiments. The measurements and analysis reported here give a spatial characterization for this type of neutron source for the first time. In addition, the forward modeling performed provides an empirical estimate of the spatial characteristics of the deuteron ion-beam. These experimental observations, taken together, provide essential yet unique data to benchmark and verify theoretical work into the basic acceleration mechanism, which remains an ongoing challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]