Data for 'Surface Plasmon-Driven Electron and Proton Acceleration without Grating Coupling'

The data here is used in the publication ‘Surface Plasmon-Driven Electron and Proton Acceleration without Grating Coupling’. The numerical simulation study focuses on the electron acceleration by laser induced high-field surface plasmon at the solid-vacuum interface when the laser is incident at a grazing angle or parallel to the target surface. Furthermore, monoenergetic proton acceleration from the contaminant layer at the rear edge of the target is observed. 2D Particle in Cell simulations (PIC) using the open- source PIC code EPOCH (https://github.com/Warwick-Plasma/epoch) were performed. It was compiled with gcc-9.3.0 and openmpi-4.0.4. The input files used to create the data have been included in this folder where the folder name describes the ‘target’ geometry and the files inside provide a parametric scan of laser and target conditions. The simulations were done for grazing incidence and parallel incidence of the pulse to the target surface as discussed in the paper. The input files are arranged in different sub folders inside two main folder ‘grazing_incidence’ and ‘parallel_incidence’ as described below – The folder ‘grazing_incidence/angle_scan’ contains the input files for the simulations with different laser incidence angle (angle between the laser and the target surface) at a laser intensity of 3.4 × 10^{19}/2 used in figure 2. Here the filename is the incidence angle . Keeping = 5 degree another set of simulations were done by varying the intensity as shown in figure 4. The input files for these simulations are in the folder ‘grazing_incidence/intensity_scan’ where the filename is the peak intensity. The folder ‘parallel_incidence’ contains input files for two sets of simulations for parallel incidence of the laser with a certain amount of focal spot shift from the target midplane () for two different intensities. The folder ‘parallel_incidence/lowintensity’ contains the input files for these simulations with laser intensity 3.4 × 10^{19}/2 used in figure 6 of the paper, and the input files for the simulations with a higher laser intensity 6 × 10^{20}/2 used in figure 8 are contained in the folder ‘parallel_incidence/highintensity’. For both the instances the filename is given by the peak intensity together with the amount of focal spot shift in micro meter. For example, for the laser intensity 3.4 × 10^{19}/2 and for a focal spot shift of 3, the filename is given by ‘3p4E19_3.deck’.