Developments in XUV laser radiography of laser driven targets

XUV lasers are being exploited for radiography with high space, time and amplitude resolution of perturbations in laser driven targets. Information of importance for research into the possibility of generating energy by inertially confined fusion has been obtained using a saturated 15.4 nm neon-like Yttrium laser [1,2,3]. More recently further work has been carried out with a neon-like Ge laser also operating at saturation with prepulse drive on the J=0-1 transition at 19.6 nm. This has enabled new avenues to be explored including the effect on the laser driven targets of single mode perturbations in the drive intensity and the transient behavior of thermal smoothing of the perturbations as illustrated by figures 1 and 2. The change in XUV opacity of the dense shock compressed target material has also been studied and is of basic science interest as it gives the first direct measurement of the scaling with density of inverse Bremsstrahlung absorption in a strongly degenerate plasma [4].