The experimental data was generated during an experimental campaign using the Phelix laser at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung laboratory near Darmstadt, Germany. The particle-in-cell simulations were performed using the two dimensional EPOCH code version 4.8.3 with the input.deck files included. The hardware used to generate the results is listed on the STFC Scientific Computing Application Resource for Facilities page: http://www.scarf.rl.ac.uk/hardware. The files labelled *.deck is the initialization file (‘Input deck’) used to generate the data. The * denotes the target thickness.