Speaker
Description
Short-pulse, laser-solid interactions provide a unique platform to develop well-characterized laboratory high-energy density (HED) matter conditions to diagnose fundamental properties such as opacity and equations of state. One common method to produce uniform density plasma conditions is through the use of buried layer targets, where a high Z target is embedded within lower Z tamping layers. We compare the plasma conditions produced by irradiating bare copper and copper embedded within aluminum and plastic tamping layers with Colorado State University’s high-contrast, high-intensity (I ∼1021 W/cm2) ALEPH laser. Simultaneous measurements of front-side and rear-side K-shell fluorescence indicates significant bulk plasma heating and the generation of micron-scale, uniformly-heated, solid-density plasmas. We implement a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate the probability distributions of the plasma temperature and density derived from the collisional-radiative modeling code SCRAM to show that the plasma conditions from bare copper targets are hotter and denser than those from the buried layer targets.
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Fusion Energy Sciences and Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNS Subcontract B643845, DOE/NNSA DEAC52), the LaserNetUS initiative at Colorado State University (Contract No. DE-SC-0019076 and DE-SC0021246), the NSERC Alliance - Alberta Innovates Advance Program (Agreement No. 212201089 and 222302077), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (grant no. RGPIN-2021-04373). This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program.
| Keyword-1 | Laser-plasma interactions |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | High energy density matter |
| Keyword-3 | X-ray spectroscopy |