The effect of target materials on colliding laser-produced plasmas

In laser ablation, nanosecond to femtosecond lasers with a wide range of laser power densities are used. During ablation, the result of collisions between two plasmas is of interest to many researchers in inertial confinement fusion and nuclear astrophysics. In this paper, the collisions of two seed plasmas ablated from planar target surfaces of different target materials (Al, Cu, and W) were studied with temporal-spatially resolved imaging and spectroscopy. The initial relative velocities and densities of the seed plasmas were measured, and then the collisional parameters were calculated to evaluate the degree of the collisions. In addition, spatially resolved spectra were analyzed to study the influences of materials on the temporal-spatial distribution of atom or ions. The results indicated that under the same laser intensity, the high atomic number (Z) material had a small value of collisionality parameter, mostly because of its heavy ion mass. Higher laser intensity would increase the initial relative velocity of seed plasmas, resulting in a lower collision frequency. In addition, the distribution of the ions from seed plasmas was influenced by the stagnation layer plasmas.