Quantitative simulations of short pulse x-ray laser experiments

EHYBRID fluid and atomic physics code simulations are compared with experimentally measured Ne-like nickel x-ray laser output at 23.1 nm and emission from nickel and germanium plasmas produced by line focus irradiation into a pre-formed plasma with 1.2 ps pulses of 1.06 μm wavelength and peak irradiance 7 x 1015 W cm-2. A particle-in-cell (PIC) code is used to simulate the laser energy absorption and resulting electron energy distribution in the experiment. It is shown that some absorbed laser energy is distributed to fast electrons that do not produce collisional excitation of the population inversion