Key to the development of compact soft x-ray lasers for applications is the understanding of the plasma physics and amplification behavior. For this purpose we have developed a two temperature 1.5D hydrodynamic code with complete atomic model and radiation transport.
The propagation of the amplified light is simulated with a 3D ray tracing post processor code. The code was used to model the amplification of high harmonic seed pulses in a dense transient collisional soft x-ray laser plasma amplifier created by heating a solid titanium target. The results of seeded amplification in the 32.6 nm line of Ne-like Ti are compared to experimental results which demonstrate the generation of a very high brightness (3-5×1025 photons/(s·mm²·mrad²·0.01% bandwidth)) soft x-ray laser beam with nearly full spatial coherence.
Work supported by the NSF ERC for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and
Technology under NSF Award EEC-0310717 and a DOE CSGF fellowship
under grant number DE-FG02-97ER25308.