Erlangen 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik
P 24: Laser Plasmas II
P 24.2: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 8. März 2018, 11:00–11:15, KI 1.174
Tailoring laser-generated plasmas for efficient nuclear excitation by electron capture — •Jonas Gunst, Yuanbin Wu, Christoph H. Keitel, and Adriana Pálffy — Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany
In the process of nuclear excitation by electron capture (NEEC), the energy gained when a free electron is recombining into a bound state of an ion is simultaneously transfered to the atomic nucleus which is thereby excited. Recently, we have shown that this process can play the leading role for nuclear excitation in cold, high-density plasmas created by an x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), even higher than the direct photoexcitation channel using the XFEL beam on resonance [1,2]. However, the actual nuclear excitation rates are still small, strongly constrained by the attainable plasma conditions.
In contrast to XFELs, optical petawatt (PW) lasers generate hot plasmas. Here, we investigate how PW lasers can be exploited to generate plasma conditions where NEEC is maximized, employing a scaling-law model for low-density scenarios and PIC simulations for high electron densities [3]. Considering the case of 93Mo isomer triggering, we find that a total increase of 6 orders of magnitude in the excitation can be achieved in comparison to the resonant-XFEL scenario.
[1] J. Gunst, Yu. A. Litvinov, C. H. Keitel, A. Pálffy, PRL 112, 082501 (2014). [2] J. Gunst, Y. Wu, N. Kumar, C. H. Keitel, A. Pálffy, Phys. Plasmas 22, 112706 (2015). [3] Y. Wu, J. Gunst, C. H. Keitel, A. Pálffy, arXiv:1708.04826 [physics.plasm-ph] (2017).