Creation of a homogeneous plasma column by means of hohlraum radiation for ion-stopping measurements

Abstract

In this work, we present the results of two-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamics simulations of a hohlraum target whose outgoing radiation is used to produce a homogeneously ionized carbon plasma for ion-beam stopping measurements. The cylindrical hohlraum with gold walls is heated by a frequency-doubled (${\lambda }_l=526.5$ $\mu m$) $1.4$ $ns$ long laser pulse with the total energy of $E_l=180$ $J$. At the laser spot, the peak matter and radiation temperatures of, respectively, $T\approx 380$ $eV$ and $T_r\approx 120$ $eV$ are observed. X-rays from the hohlraum heat the attached carbon foam with a mean density of ${\rho }_C=2$ $mg/c{m}^3$ to a temperature of $T\approx 25$ $eV$. The simulation shows that the carbon ionization degree ($Z\approx 3.75$) and its column density stay relatively stable (within variations of about $\pm 7\%$) long enough to conduct the ion-stopping measurements. Also, it is found that a special attention should be paid to the shock wave, emerging from the X-ray heated copper support plate, which at later times may significantly distort the carbon column density traversed by the fast ions.

12 pages, 12 figures

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Anomalous stopping of laser-accelerated intense proton beam in dense ionized matter
• On certain aspects of the THERMOS toolkit for modeling experiments
• Target density effects on charge tansfer of laser-accelerated carbon ions in dense plasma
• The equation of state of a partly homogenized plasma of low-dense porous matter