Strongly-coupled plasmas formed from laser-heated solids.
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.
Joint Quantum Institute and Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
M
M
Lyon
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA.
S D
SD
Bergeson
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA.
G
G
Hart
New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos, NM.
M S
MS
Murillo