Measurements and non-local thermodynamic equilibrium modeling of mid-Z plasma emission

Abstract

The x-ray yields from laser-irradiated thin foils of iron, copper, zinc, and germanium have been measured in the soft and multi-keV x-ray ranges at the OMEGA laser at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. The incident laser power had a pre-pulse to enhance the x-ray emission of a 1 ns flat-top main pulse. The experimental results have been compared with post-shot simulations performed with the two-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamics code FCI2. A new non-local thermodynamic equilibrium model, NOO-RAD, have been incorporated into FCI2. In this approach, the plasma ionization state is in-line calculated by the atomic physics NOHEL package. In the soft x-ray bands, both simulations using RADIOM [M. Busquet, Phys. Fluids B 5, 4191 (1993)] and NOO-RAD clearly over-predict the powers and energies measured by a broad-band spectrometer. In one case (the iron foil), the discrepancy between the measured and simulated x-ray output is nevertheless significantly reduced when NOO-RAD is used in the simulations. In the multi-keV x-ray bands, the simulations display a strong sensitivity to the coupling between the electron thermal conductivity and the NLTE models, and for some particular combinations of these, provide a close match to the measured emission. The comparison between the measured and simulated H-like to He-like line-intensity ratios deduced from high-resolution spectra indicates higher experimental electron temperatures were achieved, compared to the simulated ones. Measurements of the plasma conditions have been achieved using the Thomson-scattering diagnostic. The electron temperatures are found to range from 3 to 5 keV at the end of the laser pulse and are greater than predicted by the simulations. The measured flow velocities are in reasonable agreement with the calculated ones. This last finding gives us confidence in our numerical predictions for the plasma parameters, which are over that time mainly determined by hydrodynamics, such as the mass densities and the ion temperatures.