Review of upconverted Nd-glass laser plasma experiments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Systematic scaling experiments aimed at deducing the dependence of laser-plasma interaction phenomena on target plasma material and target irradiation history have been underway in laboratories all over the world in recent years. During 1980 and 1981 the Livermore program undertook to measure the laser light absorption of high and low Z plasmas and the partition of the absorbed energy amongst the thermal and suprathermal electron populations as a function of both laser intensity and wavelength. Simulations suggested that short wavelength laser light would couple more efficiently than longer wavelengths to target plasmas. Shorter wavelength heating of higher electron plasma densities would, it was felt, lead to laser-plasma interactions freer of anomalous absorption processes. The following sections review LLNL experiments designed to test these hypotheses