Advanced techniques in laser-ion acceleration: Conversion efficiency, beam distribution and energy scaling in the Break-Out Afterburner regime

Recently, increasing laser intensities and contrast made acceleration mechanisms such as the radiation pressure acceleration or the Break-Out Afterburner (BOA) accessible. These mechanisms efficiently couple laser energy into all target ion species, making them a competitive alternative to conventional accelerators. We here present experimental data addressing conversion efficiency and ion distribution scaling for both carbon C$^{6+}$ and protons within the BOA regime and the transit into the TNSA regime. Unique high resolution measurements of angularly resolved carbon C$^{6+}$ and proton energy spectra for targets ranging from 30nm to 25microns - recorded with a novel ion wide angle spectrometer - are presented and used to derive thickness scaling estimates. While the measured conversion efficiency for C$^{6+}$ reaches up to $\sim $6{\%}, peak energies of 1GeV and 120MeV have been measured for C$^{6+}$ and protons, respectively.