Abstract
A single laser pulse is used to produce weakly nonideal plasma from a metallic aluminum target immersed in a dense neutral gas. The attendant increase in plasma density due to neutral gas confinement precipitates interfacial instability when the gas density exceeds a threshold value. This is accompanied by large fluctuations in the total attenuation of the laser beam by the laser-produced plasma plume. We have developed a new diagnostic method utilizing two mutually orthogonal side-view streak photographs of plasma continuum luminosity at a fixed distance from the target surface. The lack of axial symmetry is overcome by using a front-view luminosity image of the plasma at time zero as a two-dimensional weighting factor. The resulting profile at one time is used as the weighting factor for the next time segment. The time-resolved reconstructed plasma profiles clearly exhibit the near-threshold behavior of Rayleigh–Taylor type instability.
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