The 6th International Conference on Matter and Radiation at Extremes (ICMRE2023)

We showed in a previous paper [1] that a plastic micro-cone target can be used to  enhance the intensity of a focused laser pulse higher than one order of magnitude from

the initial value of 8x1020 W/cm2 by performing two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC)  simulations.

In this study, we perform three-dimensional PIC simulations for the interaction of  a 10 PW focused laser pulse with a plastic micro-cone target with the height of 10 µm.

The initial laser pulse intensity is 1023 W/cm2 .

We obtain for different micro-cone tip  diameters an intensification higher than 20  times as can be seen in Figure 1. We plotted also in Figure 1 the intensification for the foil

targets with different thicknesses. We can see that the laser pulse is intensified more than twice by the micro-cone in comparison with the foil. Figure 2 shows us that the laser pulse is shortened by the micro-cone from 16 optical cycles to 9 optical cycles.

Therefore, micro-cone targets can be used as optical devices for guiding, intensifying, and shortening a 10 PW laser pulse without refurbishing the

laser system.

[1] O. Budriga, L. E. Ionel, D. Tatomirescu and K. A. Tanaka, Opt. Lett. 45, 3454 (2020)