Physical Review E (Plasma physics)

Author(s): K. G. Zhao, Z. Y. Li, L. F. Wang, Z. H. Di, C. Xue, H. Zhang, J. F. Wu, W. H. Ye, C. T. Zhou, Y. K. Ding, W. Y. Zhang, and X. T. He

This paper presents a numeric study of the dynamic stabilization of the ablative Rayleigh-Taylor instability (ARTI) in the presence of a temporally modulated laser pulse. The results show that the specially modulated laser produces a dynamically stabilized configuration near the ablation front. The …

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025213] Published Mon Feb 26, 2024

Author(s): A. Hirsch-Passicos, C. L. C. Lacoste, F. André, Y. Elskens, E. D'Humières, V. Tikhonchuk, and M. Bardon

The quality of the proton beam produced by target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA) with high-power lasers can be significantly improved with the use of helical coils. While they showed promising results in terms of focusing, their performances in terms of the of cut-off energy and bunching stay lim…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025211] Published Fri Feb 23, 2024

Author(s): R. Sandberg and A. G. R. Thomas

Sandberg and Thomas [Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 085001 (2023)] proposed a scheme to generate ultrashort, high-energy pulses of XUV photons though dephasingless photon acceleration in a beam-driven plasma wakefield. An ultrashort laser pulse is placed in the plasma wake behind a relativistic electron bunc…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025210] Published Fri Feb 16, 2024

Author(s): T. Z. Esirkepov and S. V. Bulanov

When a refractive index modulation of dispersive medium moves at the speed of light in vacuum, an incident electromagnetic wave, depending on its frequency, either is totally transmitted with a phase shift, or forms a standing wave, or is totally reflected with the frequency upshift. The luminal mir…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, L023202] Published Thu Feb 15, 2024

Author(s): F. R. Ramirez and P. H. Diamond

Inhomogeneous mixing by stationary convective cells set in a fixed array is a particularly simple route to layering. Layered profile structures, or staircases, have been observed in many systems, including drift-wave turbulence in magnetic confinement devices. The simplest type of staircase occurs i…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025209] Published Wed Feb 14, 2024

Author(s): Y. Bliokh, Y. Cao, V. Maksimov, A. Haim, J. G. Leopold, A. Kostinsky, and Ya. E. Krasik

It was observed experimentally that after crossing a waveguide filled with a neutral gas a short powerful microwave pulse leaves a periodic glow of plasma along the waveguide, persisting for several tens of nanoseconds. A theoretical model is presented which in combination with numerical simulations…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025208] Published Tue Feb 13, 2024

Author(s): Ben I. Squarer, Carlo Presilla, and Roberto Onofrio

We discuss conditions for the enhancement of fusion reactivities arising from different choices of energy distribution functions for the reactants. The key element for potential gains in fusion reactivity is identified in the functional dependence of the tunneling coefficient on the energy, ensuring…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025207] Published Fri Feb 09, 2024

Author(s): Thomas Gawne, Sam M. Vinko, and Justin S. Wark

Ionization is a problematic quantity in that it does not have a well-defined thermodynamic definition and yet it is a key parameter within plasma modeling. One still therefore aims to find a consistent and unambiguous definition for the ionization state. Within this context we present finite-tempera…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, L023201] Published Thu Feb 08, 2024

Author(s): Ya-Hao Hu, Su-Rong Sun, Xian Meng, He-Ji Huang, and Hai-Xing Wang

In this study, the spatiotemporal evolution of full cycle of high-intensity dc argon arc discharge at atmospheric pressure is investigated by using a transferred arc device, which is easy to be directly observed in the experiment. Combining the voltage and current waveforms with high-speed images, t…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025205] Published Tue Feb 06, 2024

Author(s): J. J. van de Wetering, S. M. Hooker, and R. Walczak

We investigate the accelerator stage of a plasma-modulated plasma accelerator (P-MoPA) [Jakobsson et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 184801 (2021)] using both the paraxial wave equation and particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. We show that adjusting the laser and plasma parameters of the modulator stage …

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025206] Published Tue Feb 06, 2024

Author(s): A. Pak et al.

The target gain greater than unity achieved in a recent fusion experiment was made possible by using additional laser energy at fixed power and controlling sources of degradation. This resulted in increased compression of the fuel and a high fusion yield corresponding to a novel physical regime. This paper describes the experimental evidence for these critical aspects and new observables.

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025203] Published Mon Feb 05, 2024

Author(s): A. L. Kritcher et al.

In 2022, a National Ignition Facility controlled-fusion experiment reached a target gain G>1, with the fusion energy produced exceeding the amount of laser energy required to drive the target. This result was obtained thanks to careful design described in this paper. This design has been shown to be robust and allows a better understanding of the physical conditions necessary to reach ignition.

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025204] Published Mon Feb 05, 2024

Author(s): Thomas F. Rösch, Masoud Afshari, Felix Balling, Leonard Doyle, Sonja Gerlach, Jens Hartmann, Alexander Prasselsperger, Stuart Morris, and Jörg Schreiber

Proton bunches with maximum energies between 12 and 22 MeV were emitted from submicrometer-thin plastic foils upon irradiation by laser pulses with peak intensity of 4×1020W/cm2. The images of the protons by a magnetic quadrupole doublet on a screen remained consistently larger by a factor of 10 com…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025201] Published Fri Feb 02, 2024

Author(s): G. Röpke, T. Dornheim, J. Vorberger, D. Blaschke, and B. Mahato

The properties of plasmas in the low-density limit are described by virial expansions. Analytical expressions are known from Green's function approaches only for the first three virial coefficients. Accurate path-integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations have recently been performed for the uniform el…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 025202] Published Fri Feb 02, 2024

Author(s): Meng Liu, Wei-Min Wang, and Yu-Tong Li

Quasimonoenergetic GeV-scale protons are predicted to be efficiently generated via radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) when the foil thickness is matched with the laser intensity, e.g., Lmat of several nm to 100 nm for 1019−1022Wcm−2 available in laboratory. However, nonmonoenergetic protons with …

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 015208] Published Fri Jan 26, 2024

Author(s): Luis Leal, Andrei Maximov, Fernando García-Rubio, Riccardo Betti, and Vladimir Ivanov

Three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations are able to model the generation of disk-shaped plasma, driven by laser ablation from a current-carrying rod in a pulsed-power machine producing azimuthal magnetic fields of 2−3 MG. The plasma at such extreme conditions is unique in that the paramete…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 015207] Published Wed Jan 24, 2024

Author(s): Hongzhe Zhou and Eric G. Blackman

Understanding magnetic field growth in astrophysical objects is a persistent challenge. In stars and galaxies, turbulent flows with net kinetic helicity are believed to be responsible for driving large-scale magnetic fields. However, numerical simulations have demonstrated that such helical dynamos …

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 015206] Published Fri Jan 19, 2024

Author(s): Bifeng Lei, Bin Liu, Mingyuan Shi, Andreas Seidel, Daniel Seipt, Matt Zepf, and Bin Qiao

Shot-to-shot electron beam pointing instability in the plasma bubble, defined here as electron beam pointing jitter (EBJ), is a long-standing problem that limits the potential of the laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) in a range of demanding applications. In general, EBJ is caused by variations in l…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 015204] Published Tue Jan 16, 2024

Author(s): M. Hasan Barbhuiya, Paul A. Cassak, Subash Adhikari, Tulasi N. Parashar, Haoming Liang, and Matthew R. Argall

A common approach to assess the nature of energy conversion in a classical fluid or plasma is to compare power densities of the various possible energy conversion mechanisms. A leading research area is quantifying energy conversion for systems that are not in local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE), a…

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 015205] Published Tue Jan 16, 2024

Author(s): J. C. Faure, D. Tordeux, L. Gremillet, and M. Lemoine

Powerful astrophysical sources are known to interact with their surroundings via extreme radiation-plasma interactions resulting from large quantities of emitted nonthermal radiation. This paper studies the physical processes involved in such interactions, combining analytical approximations with numerical simulations, and unveils a complex sequence of particle acceleration processes.

[Phys. Rev. E 109, 015203] Published Mon Jan 08, 2024