Investigation of Proton Beam-Driven Fusion Reactions Generated by an Ultra-Short Petawatt-Scale Laser Pulse

Figure 5

Pitcher-catcher nuclear activation measurements. (a) Each black data point shows the background-corrected counts as an average of the two spectrometer counts (shown in light-blue and light-green). Time zero corresponds to the time of the last laser shot on the targets. The dashed lines are the result of fitting the decays of ¹³N, ¹¹C, and ¹⁸F to the data. Note the logarithmic ordinate. Details are given in the figure legend and the text. (b) is a zoomed view of the data at early times, on a linear scale, to better visualize that the ∼6.5% contribution of ¹³N is needed to match the measurements.

(a)

(b)