Measurement of ' X-ray transitions from 1 m Kr clusters irradiated by high-intensity femtosecond laser pulses

Hansen, S. B.*; Fournier, K. B.*; Faenov, A. Y.*; Magunov, A. I.*; Pikuz, T. A.*; Skobelev, I. Y.*; Fukuda, Yuji; Akahane, Yutaka; Aoyama, Makoto; Inoue, Norihiro*; Ueda, Hideki; Yamakawa, Koichi

X-ray line emission from ' transitions in Ne-like Kr and nearby ions has been observed from 1 m Kr clusters irradiated by fs-scale laser pulses at the JAERI facility in Kyoto, Japan. The dependence of X-ray spectral features and intensity on the incident laser intensity is rather weak, indicating that the 1-2 ps cluster lifetimes limit the number of ions beyond Ne-like Kr that can be produced by collisional ionization. A collisional-radiative model based on the relativistic multiconfigured FAC code has been constructed and used to determine that the cluster plasma has electron densities near 10 cm, temperature of a few hundred eV and hot electron fraction of a few percent.