Evidence of locally enhanced target heating due to instabilities of counter-streaming fast electron beams
- Intense Laser Irradiation Laboratory at INO, CNR, Pisa (Italy)
- Physics Department, University of York, York (United Kingdom)
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550 (United States)
- Imperial College London, London (United Kingdom)
- Physics Department, University of Oxford, Oxford (United Kingdom)
- Physics Department, Queens University Belfast, Belfast (United Kingdom)
- Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, STFC, Didcot (United Kingdom)
The high-current fast electron beams generated in high-intensity laser-solid interactions require the onset of a balancing return current in order to propagate in the target material. Such a system of counter-streaming electron currents is unstable to a variety of instabilities such as the current-filamentation instability and the two-stream instability. An experimental study aimed at investigating the role of instabilities in a system of symmetrical counter-propagating fast electron beams is presented here for the first time. The fast electron beams are generated by double-sided laser-irradiation of a layered target foil at laser intensities above 10{sup 19 }W/cm{sup 2}. High-resolution X-ray spectroscopy of the emission from the central Ti layer shows that locally enhanced energy deposition is indeed achieved in the case of counter-propagating fast electron beams.
- OSTI ID:
- 22408040
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 22, Issue 2; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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