Study on Coulomb explosions of ion mixtures

Abstract

The paper presents a theoretical work on the dynamics of Coulomb explosion for\ud spherical nanoplasmas composed by two different ion species. Particular attention has\ud been dedicated to study the energy spectra of the ions with the larger charge-to-mass\ud ratio. The connection between the formation of shock shells and the energy spread of\ud the ions has been the object of a detailed analysis, showing that under particular\ud conditions the width of the asymptotic energy spectrum tends to become very\ud narrow, which leads to a multi-valued ion phase space. The conditions to generate a\ud quasi-monoenergetic ion spectrum have been rigorously demonstrated and verified by\ud numerical simulations using a technique that, exploiting the spherical symmetry of\ud the problem, allows one to obtain very accurate and precise results

Gridless particle technique for the Vlasov–Poisson system in problems with high degree of symmetry

“…In all the calculations, suitable normalization for the physical quantities has been used such that the total charge, the total mass of the plasma and the initial radius R are all equal to 1. Three cases are considered: 1) the electron expansion in a spherical plasma [4]; 2) the expansion of a plasma made of a mixture of two ion species [5]; 3) the formation of shocks in Coulomb explosions [6]. Figures 1 and 2 refer to the early stage of the electron expansion in a spherical plasma.…”

“…3 and 4) refers to the acceleration of an ion plasma made of a mixture of two different species. In this case, analytic solutions for the problem exist [5] and can be used as a reference. The two species (m 1 /m 2 = 2/3, q 1 = q 2 ) are initially at rest and the ions are accelerated by electrostatic repulsion.…”

Coulomb Expansion of Cold Non-Neutral Rubidium Plasma

“…This enables models that scale to hard-to-access plasmas that occur, for instance, in astrophysical environments (insides of stars and gas planets) [6], magnetic-confinement fusion [7,8], and inertial-confinement fusion [9,10]. Recent work in cold plasma physics has explored plasma laser cooling [11], pair correlations [12][13][14][15], dual-species ion collisions [16,17], Rydberg atom-plasma interactions [18], plasma field-sensing applications [19][20][21], and quenched randomness and localization [22].…”

Density shocks in the relativistic expansion of highly charged one component plasmas

“…The expansion dynamics of highly charged plasmas is a fundamental problem in areas ranging from astrophysics to nanotechnology to beam physics. Previous analytic work has focused on initial conditions where a highly charged plasma is cold and has uniform density [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] However, the vast majority of this work, with the exception of Bynchenkov and Kovalev [13], have assumed nonrelativistic conditions. In ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM) and some beam physics applications, electron sources are used to produce dense bunches of charged particles within an intense extraction field that is used to accelerate the distribution to near-luminal speeds.…”