Abstract
We present an analysis of ion temperatures in laser-produced plasmas formed from solids with different initial lattice structures. We show that the equilibrium ion temperature is limited by a mismatch between the initial crystallographic configuration and the close-packed configuration of a strongly-coupled plasma, similar to experiments in ultracold neutral plasmas. We propose experiments to demonstrate and exploit this crystallographic heating in order to produce a strongly coupled plasma with a coupling parameter of several hundred.
Highlights
We present an analysis of ion temperatures in laser-produced plasmas formed from solids with different initial lattice structures
We show that the equilibrium ion temperature is limited by a mismatch between the initial crystallographic configuration and the close-packed configuration of a strongly-coupled plasma, similar to experiments in ultracold neutral plasmas
Strong coupling occurs in fields as diverse as quark-gluon plasmas[1], ultracold atoms in the BEC-BCS crossover[2,3], interactions at extremely high energy density[4], quantum dots[5], superconductivity[6], and ultracold neutral plasmas[7]
Summary
Estimating the ion temperature due to crystal mismatch heating (CMH) can be more generally described. This factor-of-two calculation could be done using the atomic density and a quantity known as the atomic packing factor, A. The distance between neighboring atoms in the initial crystal lattice is twice the atomic radius, 2ra. The distance between atoms will be 2rF, with rF = (3AF/4πn)1/3 and the density n equal to the density of the initial lattice. With these definitions in mind, the difference in electric potential energy between the initial lattice and the final idealized FCC lattice can be written kBT ion
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