Enhancement of the conversion efficiency of soft x-ray by colliding gold plasmas

Abstract

A new scheme is proposed to enhance the conversion efficiency (CE) of soft x-rays (0.1–1.5 keV) generated by irradiating a double-gold-foil target using double laser pulses to collide gold plasmas. A detailed analysis of the hydrodynamic evolution of the colliding plasmas is performed by using one-dimensional radiation hydrodynamic simulations. The results show that the total soft x-ray CE can be enhanced up to 71.5% by setting the foil thickness as d1 = 0.3 μm, and this is 14.5% higher than that for a single laser irradiating a single-gold-foil target. Most of the enhanced soft x-ray CEs are generated from a stagnation layer formed by plasma collisions. Such a scheme is simple and practical, which is beneficial for their applications in astrophysical opacity calculations, inertial confinement fusion, and hydrodynamic instability analyses.

Influence of laser-induced Au-plasma plume collision on the efficiency of x-ray radiations and the energy-transport process relevant to ICF

“…Dynamics of the stagnation and penetration in the colliding region have also been studied with millijoule-or subjoule-lasers in previous work [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. In most HEDP experiments, it is always applied for the improvement of ion temperature and further for the enhancement of energy conversion efficiency from the laser to x-ray [11][12][13][14][15] or neutron [16,17] sources. While in the lab-astrophysics, it is widely used to create the analogous situation to investigate the collisionless shock [18][19][20][21], magnetic reconnection [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], Weible instability [31,32], electron-acceleration mechanism [33], outflow collimation [34,35] and space charge separation [2,36]…”

“…Plasma collision is a Universe phenomenon widely existing in High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], laboratorybased astrophysics [2,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], and Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) projects [37]. Since rich dynamic physics exist during the colliding process, a series of different configurations have been proposed by multi-beam laser-plasma interactions.…”