Laser meson factory

Abstract: Modern XCELS-type laser facilities under development can be a good addition to traditional meson factories, leading to high momentum fluxes of elementary particles produced by irradiation of converter targets with a laser-accelerated electron or proton beam. This is substantiated by the numerical simulation of the generation of high-current charged particle beams under the action of a femtosecond laser pulse from the XCELS facility either on a near-critical density plasma or on a denser (but still low-density) plasma, and the subsequent calculation of the meson yield from the converter target. The end-to-end simulation by the particle-to-cell method (PIC codes) and the Monte Carlo method (GEANT4 code) quantitatively characterizes the generation of pions, mesons, kaons, and even more exotic elementary particles. For example, the number of produced pions for the parameters of the XCELS laser pulse is predicted to be about 10⁸ particles per shot. The calculation of the yield of fast neutrons is also performed, the number of which exceeds 10¹¹ particles.

Keywords: laser electron/ion acceleration, laser neutron source, pion production, Monte Carlo simulation with a GEANT4 code.