Direct observation of strong coupling in a dense plasma
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Updated: Sep 28, 2026

Investigation of Early Plasma Evolution Induced by Ultrashort Laser Pulses
Published on: July 2, 2012
D Riley1, I Weaver, D McSherry
1School of Mathematics and Physics, The Queen's University of Belfast, University Road, United Kingdom. d.riley@qub.ac.uk
Abstract:
We present differential x-ray scattering cross sections for a radiatively heated plasma showing overall consistency, in both form and absolute value, with theoretical simulations. In particular, the evolution of the plasma from a strongly coupled high density phase to a lower density weakly coupled phase is quite clearly shown in both experiment and simulation. The success of this experiment shows that x-ray scattering has the potential to become an extremely useful diagnostic technique for dense plasma physics.
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