100 Femtosecond laser absorption in solid density targets

Conference · Tue Oct 08 04:00:00 EDT 1996

OSTI ID:508735

Price, D F; More, R M; Walling, R S; Stewart, R E

Experimental short pulse lasers are rapidly approaching energy levels where target irradiances exceeding 10{sup 20} W/CM{sup 2} are routinely achievable. These high intensity levels will open up a new class of solid target interaction physics where relativistic effects must be included and non-traditional absorption mechanisms become significant. However much remains to be understood of the absorption physics at lower intensities where classical absorption is dominated by collisional and resonance absorption. If attention is paid to producing clean laser pulses that do not significantly pre-pulse interact with the target, it is possible to produce plasmas of sufficiently short scale length that near-solid density interactions are observable at intensities exceeding 10{sup 18} W/CM{sup 2} for 100 fs laser irradiation. We report here extensions to our previous efforts at normal incidence that expand our observations to non-normal angles including the effect of polarization for several target materials. Between 10{sup 13} W/CM{sup 2} and 10{sup 14} W/CM{sup 2} we observe that the target absorption retains a signature of the intra-band atomic transitions. At higher intensities a more material independent ion-electron collisional absorption and short scale length resonance absorption dominate. P - polarized absorption in short scale length plasmas has been observed to exceed 60 percent.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-48
• OSTI ID: 508735
• Report Number(s): UCRL-JC--125802; CONF-970312--1; ON: DE97051541
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
ABSORPTION
LASER TARGETS