Observation of ultrafast solid-density plasma dynamics using femtosecond X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser

Abstract

The complex physics of the interaction between short pulse high intensity lasers and solids is so far hardly accessible by experiments. As a result of missing experimental capabilities to probe the complex electron dynamics and competing instabilities, this impedes the development of compact laser-based next generation secondary radiation sources, e.g. for tumor therapy [Bulanov2002,ledingham2007], laboratory-astrophysics [Remington1999,Bulanov2015], and fusion [Tabak2014]. At present, the fundamental plasma dynamics that occur at the nanometer and femtosecond scales during the laser-solid interaction can only be elucidated by simulations. Here we show experimentally that small angle X-ray scattering of femtosecond X-ray free-electron laser pulses facilitates new capabilities for direct in-situ characterization of intense short-pulse laser plasma interaction at solid density that allows simultaneous nanometer spatial and femtosecond temporal resolution, directly verifying numerical simulations of the electron density dynamics during the short pulse high intensity laser irradiation of a solid density target. For laser-driven grating targets, we measure the solid density plasma expansion and observe the generation of a transient grating structure in front of the pre-inscribed grating, due to plasma expansion, which is an hitherto unknown effect. We expect that our results will pave the way for novel time-resolved studies, guiding the development of future laser-driven particle and photon sources from solid targets.

References in corpus (11)

• Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction
• Femtosecond Diffractive Imaging with a Soft-X-ray Free-Electron Laser
• Vacuum laser acceleration of relativistic electrons using plasma mirror injectors
• Harmonic Generation from Relativistic Plasma Surfaces in Ultra-Steep Plasma Density Gradients
• Evidence of resonant surface wave excitation in the relativistic regime through measurements of proton acceleration from grating targets
• Relativistic electron streaming instabilities modulate proton beams accelerated in laser-plasma interactions
• Laser-Driven Rayleigh-Taylor Instability: Plasmonics Effects and Three-Dimensional Structures
• Using XFELs for Probing of Complex Interaction Dynamics of Ultra-Intense Lasers with Solid Matter
• Nanoscale femtosecond imaging of transient hot solid density plasmas with elemental and charge state sensitivity using resonant coherent diffraction
• Two surface plasmon decay of plasma oscillations
• Ion heating dynamics in solid buried layer targets irradiated by ultra-short intense laser pulses

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization in the x-ray regime
• Towards a Quantum Fluid Theory of Correlated Many-Fermion Systems from First Principles
• Few-femtosecond resolved imaging of laser-driven nanoplasma expansion
• Thermal Signals from Collective Electronic Excitations in Inhomogeneous Warm Dense Matter
• Demonstration of full-scale spatio-temporal diagnostics of solid-density plasmas driven by an ultra-short relativistic laser pulse using an X-ray free-electron laser
• Probing the dynamics of solid density micro-wire targets after ultra-intense laser irradiation using a free-electron laser