Abstract
Heating a solid material with laser-accelerated fast electrons is a particularly useful method for generating a plane powerful shock wave with a pressure of several hundred or even thousands of Mbar in the laboratory. Behind the front of such a powerful shock wave, dense plasma is heated to a temperature of several keV. Then, a high rate of radiation energy loss occurs even in low-Z plasmas. In this paper, the strong compression of matter due to radiation cooling in a Gbar shock wave driven by fast electrons is studied using both computational and theoretical approaches. It is shown that the effect of radiation cooling leads to compression of matter in the peripheral region of the shock wave to a density several times greater than the density at its front. Heating a solid material by a petawatt flux of laser-accelerated fast electrons offers the opportunity to surpass the gigabar pressure level of plane shock waves generated by the impact of laser-accelerated pellets. Higher pressures of about 100 Gbar can be achieved under laboratory conditions only when a spherical target is imploded under the action of a terawatt laser pulse.
Highlights
Heating a solid material with a laser-accelerated charged particle beam is an effective way to generate a powerful plane shock wave with a pressure of several hundred or even thousands of megabars (Mbar)1–3 in a laboratory experiment
The continual growth in the energies available at modern laser facilities with terawatt and petawatt power outputs allows us to consider laser-accelerated charged particle beams as an effective tool for generating the super-powerful shock waves in sufficiently large volumes of matter that meet the needs of such important applications as inertial confinement fusion (ICF), studies of the equations of state (EOS) of materials, and laboratory astrophysics
The potential capabilities of shock wave generation by heating a solid material with a petawatt flux of laser-accelerated fast electrons go beyond those of the method based on the impact of laser-accelerated pellets,4,5 which has been shown to be capable of generating a plane shock wave with the record pressure of 740 Mbar
Summary
Heating a solid material with a laser-accelerated charged particle beam is an effective way to generate a powerful plane shock wave with a pressure of several hundred or even thousands of megabars (Mbar) in a laboratory experiment. This is due to the fact that the energy flux density of such a beam is close to the intensity of the laser pulse that produces it. The potential capabilities of shock wave generation by heating a solid material with a petawatt flux of laser-accelerated fast electrons go beyond those of the method based on the impact of laser-accelerated pellets, which has been shown to be capable of generating a plane shock wave with the record pressure of 740 Mbar..
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