Intense, high-quality ion beams generated by ultra-intense lasers

The advent of ultra-intense short-pulse laser systems has opened the field of relativistic laser-generated plasmas in which the electron temperature exceeds several MeV. One particularly exciting topic of recent interest has been the discovery of intense, collimated, energetic beams of ions off the back surface of solid targets. The beam currents exceed several hundreds of kiloamperes at a pulse duration of only a few picoseconds.