Modeling Extreme Ultraviolet Lasers
Mark Berrill, Colorado State University
Extreme ultraviolet lasers, with wavelengths about fifty times shorter than visible light, are a new and powerful tool for scientific applications. Due to their short wavelength and large photon energy, they are capable of interacting with matter in significantly smaller areas and new ways. This makes them particularly interesting for high resolution microscopy, lithography, nanotechnology, photophyiscs, and photochemistry applications. Key to their development is a proper 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 amplified light is simulated with a 3D ray tracing post processor code. The propagation code solves the populations of the ions and laser transition self-consistently with the intensity of amplified light in a fully transient approximation. 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 target. The results of the simulation are presented.
Abstract Author(s): Mark Berrill and Jorge Rocca