Just as the wind boosts a sail, the pressure of light may accelerate a
reflecting object. A few years after the invention of the laser, the idea of a
rocket boosted by an Earth-based laser system was proposed for interstellar
travel. With the recent advent of ultrapowerful laser systems the “Light Sail”
concept, scaled down to sub-millimeter lengths and times of one millionth of
millionth of a second, may yield acceleration values similar to those near the
surface of a Black Hole and provide compact sources of high-energy ions for
applications in technology and medicine.
Using the VULCAN Petawatt (one thousand of billions of Watt power) laser at
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) to irradiate sub-micrometric thin foils,
a collaboration leaded by a group from The Queen’s University of Belfast and
including theoretical support from a CNR/INO scientist (A. Macchi) has given
for the first time evidence of the typical scaling of the energy per
nucleon versus the laser and target parameters that is typical of the Light
Sail model. The scaling with the laser energy is the fastest obtained so far
in experiments on laser-driven acceleration of ions, and together with the
large number of accelerated ions it makes this approach quite promising for
future developments.

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News by Macchi Andrea