Proton acceleration in plasma waves produced by backward Raman scattering

This paper proposes a new method of proton acceleration. A slow plasma wave produced by backward Raman scattering captures slow protons injected. A density gradient of a plasma enables the wave phase velocity to increase as the proton test beams are accelerated. A proof-of-principle experiment is proposed using a T/sup 3/ laser and test beams from a Van de Graaff accelerator, in which a 500 mJ laser will give acceleration gain of /spl sim/50 MeV in a distance of 500 /spl mu/m.