Hard x-ray emission in the energy range of 30–300 keV from copper plasmas produced by 100-fs, 806-nm laser pulses at intensities in the range of 10210 W cm is investigated. We demonstrate that surface roughness of the targets overrides the role of polarization state in the coupling of light to the plasma. We further show that surface roughness has a significant role in enhancing the x-ray emiss...

The investigation of the inner core of dense, cool plasmas is due to the high opacity and weak self emission a difficult issue. A powerful diagnostic tool for these plasmas is an X-ray backlighter [1]. For this experimental setup a laser plasma is used as an intense X-ray source to either shadowgraph [2] the plasma or to do absorption spectroscopy [3]. This setup allows a high temporal resoluti...

3 gehaltenen Sonde analysiert. Zusätzlich wirkende Potentiale und die Viskosität des umgebenden Mediums können gemessen werden.

We present a quantitative shadowgraphic method which can measure the density of a laser-generated plasma in air with sensitivity and resolution comparable or better than traditional interferometric techniques. Simultaneous comparison of both shadowgraphy and interferometry has been carried out allowing the experimental evaluation of the reliability of the shadowgraphic method. c © 2008 Optical ...

We review some recent results that have been obtained in the investigation of collisionless reconnection in two dimensional magnetic configurations with a strong guide field in regimes of interest for laboratory plasmas. First we adopt a two-fluid dissipationless plasma model where the plasma evolution is described by the advection of two Lagrangian invariant fields. Then, we show that an analo...