High energy density plasmas produced by femtosecond-laser driven shocks

Summary form only given, as follows. High energy, femtosecond lasers are becoming increasingly more accessible to researchers. This has prompted us to employ such sources for producing high energy density plasmas in the laboratory. We describe the technique of using femtosecond lasers to drive colliding shocks into a thin layer (1000 /spl Aring/) of aluminum embedded between tamper layers of beryllium. These can lead to aluminum plasmas at densities several times that of the normal solid and temperatures of several tens of eV. These allow one to reach interesting states of matter for the study of pressure ionization in an uncharted regime.