Compact, Quality-Preserving Energy Booster for Intense Laser-Plasma Ion Sources M. Garten, S.S. Bulanov, S. Hakimi, L. Obst-Huebl, C.E. Mitchell, C. B. Schroeder, E. Esarey, C.G.R. Geddes, J.L. Vay and A. Huebl Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency via Northrop Grumman Corporation. Partly supported by the U.S. DOE FES Postdoctoral Research Program, administered by ORISE under contract DE-SC0014664, the U.S. DOE Office of Science Offices of ASCR, HEP and FES (incl. LaserNetUS) under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, and the Exascale Computing Project (17-SC-20-SC). This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the ORNL (DE-AC05-00OR22725, ALCC program) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (DE-AC02-05CH11231, FES-ERCAP0024250). We thank R.T. Sandberg, D. Terzani, R. Lehe and J. Qiang for helpful discussions. Simulations used the open source particle-in-cell code WarpX in version 23.01. We acknowledge all WarpX contributors. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.11217273 Laser-Plasma Ion Sources unique, pulsed, ultra-intense TE Cowan et al., PRL 92 (2004) F Wagner et al., PRL 116 (2016) A Higginson et al., Nat. Comm. 9 (2018) M Rehwald et al., Nat. Comm. 14 (2023) T Ziegler et al., Nat. Phys. (2024) First Quality-Preserving Plasma Staging Concept for Ultra-Intense Ion Bunches M Garten et al., "Laser-Plasma Ion Beam Booster Based on Hollow-Channel Magnetic Vortex Acceleration", under review, arXiv:2308.04745 (2024) ✓open-source development ✓scalable multi/manycore CPUs/GPUs from laptop to ExaFlop/s supercomputer ✓multi-platform Linux, macOS, Windows ✓multi-disciplinary ✓extensive documentation ✓large & active community Full 3D Simulations show robustness & capture efficiency WarpX is part of the Beam, Plasma & Accelerator Simulation Toolkit Electromagnetic particle-in-cell modeling of laser-plasma physics includes all relevant relativistic and kinetic effects from first principles. WarpX is developed by leveraging expertise in physics, applied math & HPC in collaboration with US and international collaborators. We organize in Open Governance and join the: Created in laser-plasma interaction, driven by laser intensities ≈1023 W/cm2 ●ultra-low emittance (≪ 20 nm) ●very high charge (≫ 100 pC) ●large current (> kA) ●ultra-short (10s of fs) ●TV/m fields for compact acceleration length (≈ few μm). With current short-pulse Petawatt laser facilities, laser-ion acceleration remains an indirect process due to the high mass of ions compared to plasma electrons. Experiments demonstrated 150 MeV / u. Maximum proton energy for selected laser-ion acceleration mechanisms. Ref.: S Hakimi et al., PoP 29 (2022) Temporal & Spatial Tolerance energy boost and capture efficiency are within experimentally achievable tolerances & source parameters Magnetic-Vortex-Acceleration combines strong ●accelerating and ●focusing fields with 10s of MV/μm. At BELLA iP2, first experimental campaigns that explore MVA as a source are underway. Now, a plasma ion accelerator will need booster elements, too! We propose a new concept & self-consistent numerical proof: plasma staging of sub- to fully relativistic ion beams. Modified MVA stage with a pre-formed hole supresses low-energy ion injection – instead boosts a well-timed, external ion beam. Self-consistent 3D modeling, boosting a space-charge dominated 200 pC proton beam (35 kA, dƐ=5%). Quality-preserving: ✓charge (perfect) ✓emittance (+3.5nm) ✓energy spread (+2%) Outlook pivotal applications, realization in current or near-term laser facilities, interstage transport L Obst-Huebl et al., SPIE (2023) AD Piazza et al., MP3 workshop report (2022) S Busold et al., TUME030, IPAC14 and NiMA 740 (2014) and Sci. Rep. 5 (2015) Could boost laser-ion beams relevant to fundamental research & applications, e.g., futu