Landau damping in thin films irradiated by a strong laser field

Abstract

The rate of linear collisionless damping (Landau damping) in a classical electron gas confined to a heated ionized thin film is calculated. The general expression for the imaginary part of the dielectric tensor in terms of the parameters of the single-particle self-consistent electron potential is obtained. For the case of a deep rectangular well, it is explicitly calculated as a function of the electron temperature in the two limiting cases of specular and diffuse reflection of the electrons from the boundary of the self-consistent potential. For realistic experimental parameters, the contribution of Landau damping to the heating of the electron subsystem is estimated. It is shown that for films with a thickness below about 100 nm and for moderate laser intensities it may be comparable with or even dominate over electron-ion collisions and inner ionization.

arXiv comment15 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Ionization of clusters in intense laser pulses through collective electron dynamics

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Harmonic emission from cluster nanoplasmas subject to intense short laser pulses
• Collisionless absorption, hot electron generation, and energy scaling in intense laser-target interaction
• Semiclassical Vlasov and fluid models for an electron gas with spin effects
• Plasma surface dynamics and smoothing in the relativistic few-cycle regime
• Heating mechanisms in radio frequency driven ultracold plasmas
• Relaxation and Collective Excitations of Cluster Nano-Plasmas
• Phase-space modelling of solid-state plasmas
• Harmonics Generation in Ultra-Thin Nanofilms Irradiated by Intense Nonrelativistic Short Laser Pulse