Neutral Gas-Confined Laser-Produced Plasm

" A single high-power laser pulse can produce a weakly nonideal plasma plume from a metallic surface, whose Coulomb interaction energy density is no longer negligible compared with the plasmas thermal energy density. An open issue of significant interest is the way in which the Debye length scaling breaks down in the nonideal plasma regime. The breakdown is closely aligned with ionization potential lowering and modifications to the plasmas self-absorption properties. Our program for delineation of the breakdown consists of full reconstruction of the plasma as a 3-D radiator, consistent with all lower-dimensional observables as constraints. Attempts to substantially increase the plasma density by dense neutral gas confinement have resulted in asymmetric plumes due to development of Rayleigh-Taylor instability, leading to charge separation and emergence of local electric fields. This has led us to develop a robust algorithm for reconstruction of the transient structure of an arbitrary volume radiator. The physics of the algorithm will be presented, together with its generalization. *Visiting SNU on leave from Lehigh University during the year 2003-0 "