same way that an external field would. If the fields are strong enough, all of the ionized plasma electrons can be removed from the center of the wake: this is known as the "blowout regime". Although the particles are not moving very quickly during this period, macroscopically it appears that a "bubble" of charge is moving through the plasma at close to the speed of light. The bubble is the region cleared of electrons that is thus positively charged, followed by the region where the electrons fall back into the center and is thus negatively charged. This leads to a small area of very strong potential gradient following the laser pulse. In the linear regime, plasma electrons aren't completely removed from the center of the wake. In this case, the linear plasma wave equation can be applied. However, the wake appears very similar to the blowout regime, and the physics of acceleration is the same. It is this "wakefield" that is used for particle acceleration. A particle injected into the plasma near the high-density area will experience an acceleration toward (or away) from it, an acceleration that continues as the wakefield travels through the column, until the particle eventually reaches the speed of the wakefield. Even higher energies can be reached by injecting the particle to travel across the face of the wakefield, much like a surfer can travel at speeds much higher than the wave they surf on by traveling across it. Accelerators designed to take advantage of this technique have been referred to colloquially as "surfatrons". Ion Laser-solid acceleration Laser-solid target based ion acceleration has become an active area of research, especially since the discovery of Target Normal Sheath Acceleration. This new scheme offers further improvements in hadrontherapy, fusion fast ignition and sources for fundamental research. Nonetheless, the maximum energies achieved so far with this scheme are in the order of 100 MeV energies. The main laser-solid acceleration scheme is Target Normal Sheath Acceleration, TNSA as it is usually referred as. TNSA like other laser based acceleration techniques is not capable of directly accelerating the ions. Instead it is a multi-step process consisting of several stages each with its associated difficulty to model mathematically. For this reason, so far there exists no perfect theoretical model capable of producing quantitative predictions for the TNSA mechanism. Particle-in-Cell simulations are usually employed to efficiently achieve predictions. The scheme employs a solid