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Abstract Laser-plasma acceleration of protons offers a compact, ultra-fast alternative to conventional acceleration techniques, and is being widely pursued for potential applications in medicine, industry and fundamental science. Creating a stable, collimated beam of protons at high repetition rates presents a key challenge. Here, we demonstrate the generation of multi-MeV proton beams from a fast-replenishing ambient-temperature liquid sheet. The beam has an unprecedentedly low divergence of 1° (≤20 mrad), resulting from magnetic self-guiding of the proton beam during propagation through a low density vapour. The proton beams, generated at a repetition rate of 5 Hz using only 190 mJ of laser energy, exhibit a hundred-fold increase in flux compared to beams from a solid target. Coupled with the high shot-to-shot stability of this source, this represents a crucial step towards applications. 

Compact, stable, and versatile laser-driven ion sources hold great promise for applications ranging from medicine to materials science and fundamental physics. While single-shot sources have demonstrated favorable beam properties, including the peak fluxes necessary for several applications, high-repetition-rate operation will be necessary to generate and sustain the high average flux needed for many of the most exciting applications of laser-driven ion sources. Further, to navigate through the high-dimensional space of laser and target parameters toward experimental optima, it is essential to develop ion acceleration platforms compatible with machine learning techniques and capable of autonomous real-time optimization. Here, we present a multi-Hz ion acceleration platform employing a liquid sheet jet target. We characterize the laser-plasma interaction and the laser-driven proton beam across a variety of key parameters governing the interaction using an extensive suite of online diagnostics. We also demonstrate real-time, closed-loop optimization of the ion beam maximum energy by tuning the laser wave front using a Bayesian optimization scheme. This approach increased the maximum proton energy by 11% compared to a manually optimized wave front by enhancing the energy concentration within the laser focal spot, demonstrating the potential for closed-loop optimization schemes to tune future ion accelerators for robust high-repetition-rate operation. 

We report a new measurement of transverse single-spin asymmetries for dijet production in collisions of polarized protons at $\sqrt{s}=200\mathrm{GeV}$ . Correlations between the proton spin and the transverse momenta of its partons, each perpendicular to the proton momentum direction, are probed at high $Q^2\approx 160{\mathrm{GeV}}^2$ . Evidence for nonzero Sivers effects is measured for the first time in dijets from proton-proton collisions, but only when the jets are sorted by their net charge, which enhances the otherwise canceling opposite-sign $u$ - or $d$ -quark contributions to separate data samples. The resulting asymmetries are compared to recent theoretical calculations. Separately, the associated Sivers observable $⟨k_T⟩$ , the average parton transverse momentum, is extracted using a simple kinematics approach which further enables a determination of the individual partonic contributions to the observed asymmetries.