The PHEBUS experimental facility operating at 250 ps and 0·53 μm

The experiments reported in this paper demonstrate that the PHEBUS laser facility is now currently being operated with high performances (4 TW with 250 ps pulses at 0·527 μm wavelength).The output energy of the 2-beam PHEBUS laser system can be focused either in a small focal spot (80% of the incident energy is in a 220 μm diameter focal spot) for high intensity experiments (≥5 × 1015 W cm−2) or in very large spots (a few mm in diameter) at moderate intensities (1013 − 2·5 × 1014 W cm−2), for large scale experiments. It is shown that the spatial intensity distribution in the target plane is primarily due to intensity independent aberrations and to diffraction. Laser light absorption in plane aluminum and gold targets are interpreted in terms of inverse bremsstrahlung absorption that may account for 70 to 90% of absorbed energy. Finally, the plasma expansion is shown to be very planar and comparison with one-dimensional Lagrangian simulations gives flux limiter values of 0·03 and 0·02 respectively for Al and Au targets.