Abstract
The heating of dense matter to extreme temperatures motivates the development of powerful lasers1,2,3,4. However, the barrier the critical electron density imposes to light penetration into ionized materials results in the deposition of most of the laser energy into a thin surface layer at typically only 0.1% of solid density. Here, we demonstrate that trapping of femtosecond laser pulses of relativistic intensity deep within ordered nanowire arrays can volumetrically heat dense matter into a new ultrahot plasma regime. Electron densities nearly 100 times greater than the typical critical density and multi-keV temperatures are achieved using laser pulses of only 0.5 J energy. We obtained extraordinarily high degrees of ionization (for example, 52 times ionized Au) and gigabar pressures only exceeded in the central hot spot of highly compressed thermonuclear fusion plasmas. Scaling to higher laser intensities promises to create plasmas with temperatures and pressures approaching those in the centre of the Sun.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a Defense Threat Reduction Agency grant (HDTRA-1-10-1-0079) and by the HEDLP programme of the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy. The experiments were conducted at facilities from the National Science Foundation (NSF) ERC for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology at Colorado State University using equipment develop under NSF grant MRI-ARRA 09-561. A.P. acknowledges support from DFG funded project TR18. The authors acknowledge the contributions of D. Ryan, C. Benton, A. Nobel and M. Woolston in relation to the experimental set-up, E. Jackson for nanowire target fabrication and C. Menoni and D. Patel for providing high-damage-threshold coatings. The authors thank J. Reader, J. Gillaspy, A. Kramida and J. Curry from NIST, Gaithersburg, for providing the atomic spectral data used to interpret the spectra, and R. London, R. Lee and M. Schneider for discussions and references.
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V.N.S. and J.J.R. conceived the experiment. A.Pu. developed the PIC model and performed the simulations. J.J.R. and M.A.P. designed the experiment. M.A.P., R.H., C.B. and J.J.R. carried out the experiment and acquired the data. Y.W., B.M.L. and J.J.R. developed the ultrashort pulse laser. Y.W., L.Y. and S.W. contributed to making the laser operational for the experiments and R.H., A.P. and C.B. developed the nanowire targets. V.N.S. conducted hydrodynamic simulations and V.N.S., A.Pu. and J.J.R. interpreted the simulations. M.A.P., J.J.R., V.N.S. and A.Pu. wrote the paper, with contributions from the other authors.
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Purvis, M., Shlyaptsev, V., Hollinger, R. et al. Relativistic plasma nanophotonics for ultrahigh energy density physics. Nature Photon 7, 796–800 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.217
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.217
