Radiative cooling induced plasma collapse observed in laser irradiation of a CH-tamped gold micro-disk

Time-resolved x-ray self-emission imaging was used to study the dynamic evolution of a laser-produced gold plasma tamped by plastic (CH), and a significant plasma collapse was observed during the laser irradiation. The plasma collapse, a kind of transverse contraction, has been ascribed to the radial compression caused by the different radiative coolingrates and thus different pressures between the central high-Z gold plasma and the surrounding low-Z CH plasma, and this has been reproduced by numerical simulations using the two-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamics code Multi2D. The experimental results represent an observation of the radiative coolinginduced plasma jet within a 1 ns laser pulse duration, much more quickly than those reported previously. In addition, our experiment design may offer a method to study the radiative coolingrates of high-Z plasmas. The measured cooling rate is a factor of 2 higher than the theoretical result [Post et al., At. Data Nucl. Data Tables 20, 397 (1977)], but is wi...