Data for "Surface Wave Electron Acceleration from Flat Foils at Parallel Laser Incidence"

This dataset supports the publication “Surface Wave Electron Acceleration from Flat Foils at Parallel Laser Incidence”. The experiment demonstrates the excitation of surface plasma waves on flat, non-corrugated foils and the generation of a collimated electron beam with pronounced spectral peaks at tens of MeV energies. The results were verified using multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations.

The raw data from the laser-axis Electron Spectrometer (ESpec 0 degrees) is used to produce Figure 2 of the paper, which includes raw image plate scans and the corresponding electron spectra. Selected shots are highlighted to show the dependence of electron flux on target length, with additional shots (shown in grey) illustrating shot-to-shot fluctuations.

The file experimental_data.csv contains information relating to the shot number including target length, target thickness, laser energy (before compressor) and shot position from the rear edge. Shot numbers in this file correspond to the file names of the associated raw data.

Simulations were performed on the Kelvin cluster at QUB using EPOCH (compiled with GCC 14.1.0 and OpenMPI 5.0.3). EPOCH is available from the Warwick Plasma GitHub repository. Two-dimensional PIC simulations were used to investigate the underlying physics of the interaction. Example input files for a target length scan are located in simulation_data/length_scan, with file names corresponding to the target length. All simulations include particle tracking.

Funding from EPSRC [EP/P010059/1], the IMPULSE project by the European Union Framework Program for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under grant agreement No 871161, and the UHDPULSE EMPIR programme co-financed by the Participating States and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Through using the EPOCH code, this work has also in part been supported by EPSRC grants EP/G054950/1, EP/G056803/1, EP/G055165/1 and EP/ M022463/1.