Observation of collisionless shocks in laser-plasma experiments

Romagnani, L.*; Bulanov, S. V.; Borghesi, M.*; Audebert, P.*; Gauthier, J. C.*; Lwenbrck, K.*; Mackinnon, A. J.*; Patel, P.*; Pretzler, G.*; Toncian, T.*; et al.

Physical Review Letters, 101(2), p.025004_1 - 025004_4, 2008/07

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.025004

The propagation in a rarefied plasma of collisionless shock-waves and ion-acoustic solitons, excited following the interaction of a long and intense laser pulse with solid targets, has been investigated via proton probing techniques. The shocks structures and related electric field distributions were reconstructed with high spatial and temporal resolution. The experimental results were interpreted within the framework of the nonlinear wave description based on the Korteweg-de Vries-Burgers (KdV-B) equation.