Abstract

As a pump laser to create a strong x-ray emitting plasma, we designed a novel pulse-train laser system that can produced a multipluse of up to 16 pulses and can vary the time interval between pulses (interpulse time γ) from 200 to 800 ps. The pulse width of each pulse was about 100 ps. Temporal and spatial behaviors of the emitted soft x-ray spectra were observed along the axial direction of a line plasma by using an XUV flat-field spectrograph. At the focal plane of this spectrograph, an x-ray film¹ or a photocathode coupled to a streak camera was attached. As is shown below, the advantages of this method are that a pulse-train laser can heat a dense plasma successively and promotes ionization of atoms efficiently up to higher stages with very low peak power.

© 1992 Optical Society of America