Particle-In-Cell simulation of laser irradiated two-component microspheres in 2 and 3 dimensions

Abstract We examine proton acceleration from spherical carbon-hydrogen targets irradiated by a relativistic laser pulse. Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations are carried out in 2 and 3 dimensions (2D and 3D) to compare fast proton spectra. We find very different final kinetic energies in 2D and 3D simulations. We show that they are caused by the different Coulomb fields in 2D and 3D. We propose a correction scheme for the proton energies to test this hypothesis. In the case of sub-focus diameter targets comparison of corrected 2D energies with 3D results show good agreement. This demonstrates that caution is required when modeling experiments with simulations of reduced dimensionality.