Production of high magnetic fields by using high power lasers and scaling to medium power lasers

Abstract

Generation of intense currents through the emission of hot electrons beams from laser-plasma interactions has demonstrated to be an alternative for producing pulsed high magnetic fields. In the past, it was reported the generation of fields as high as 4 MGs in experiments with lasers for which the product between the intensity and the square wavelength is Iλ2 ∼ 1016 W/cm2 μm2. In this work, we review and discuss the possibility to scale this kind of experiments for producing high magnetic fields by using medium power lasers where Iλ2 < 1014 W/cm2 μm2. We report results of preliminary experiments in which we used a Nd: YAG laser (6-8 ns FWMH, 1.3 J Maximal pulse energy, λ=1.064 μm, Iλ2 ∼ 1011-13 W/cm2 μm2).