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

Figure 6

Neutron time-of-flight data and spectra, from an average of 30 shots. (a) shows the background-corrected traces for the pitcher-catcher experiment vs. a pitcher-only aluminum target. The pitcher-catcher trace shows a signal at around 100 ns that is above the noise level. (b) shows the same data, converted to neutron kinetic energy. The first peak corresponds to ∼2–7 MeV energy, and a potential second peak is at ∼1.3 MeV energy. It is at present not clear whether this second peak is an artifact due to the noise; we have planned to investigate this in the future. The uncertainty in the detector distance leads to an error of the calculated energies, visualized by the shaded areas.

(a)

(b)