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Updated: Jul 10, 2026

Investigation of Early Plasma Evolution Induced by Ultrashort Laser Pulses
Published on: July 2, 2012
Experimental realization of an exact solution to the Vlasov equations for an expanding plasma
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
Abstract:
We study the expansion of ultracold neutral plasmas in the regime in which inelastic collisions are negligible. The plasma expands due to the thermal pressure of the electrons, and for an initial spherically symmetric Gaussian density profile, the expansion is self-similar. Measurements of the plasma size and ion kinetic energy using fluorescence imaging and spectroscopy show that the expansion follows an analytic solution of the Vlasov equations for an adiabatically expanding plasma.
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