Laser driven proton acceleration and beam shaping

In the race to obtain protons with higher energies, using more compact systems at the same time, laser-driven plasma accelerators are becoming an interesting possibility. But for now, only beams with extremely broad energy spectra and high divergence have been produced. The driving line of this PhD thesis was the study and design of a compact system to extract a high quality beam out of the initial bunch of protons produced by the interaction of a laser pulse with a thin solid target, using experimentally reliable technologies in order to be able to test such a system as soon as possible. In this thesis, different transport lines are analyzed. The first is based on a high field pulsed solenoid, some collimators and, for perfect filtering and post-acceleration, a high field high frequency compact linear accelerator, originally designed to accelerate a 30 MeV beam extracted from a cyclotron. The second one is based on a quadruplet of permanent magnetic quadrupoles: thanks to its greater simplicity and reliability, it has great interest for experiments, but the effectiveness is lower than the one based on the solenoid; in fact, the final beam intensity drops by an order of magnitude. An additional sensible decrease in intensity is verified in the third case, where the energy selection is achieved using a chicane, because of its very low efficiency for off-axis protons. The proposed schemes have all been analyzed with 3D simulations and all the significant results are presented. Future experimental work based on the outcome of this thesis can be planned and is being discussed now.