ABSTRACT
The reliability and characteristics of collisionally pumped soft x-ray lasers make them ideal for a wide variety of plasma diagnostics. These systems now operate over a wavelength range extending from 35 to 400 Å and have output energies as high as 10 mJ in 150 ps pulses. The beam divergence of these lasers is less than 15 mrad and they have a typical linewidth of Δλ/λ ~ 10−4 making them the brightest xuv sources available. In this paper we will describe the use of x-ray lasers to probe high density plasmas using a variety of diagnostic techniques. Using an x-ray laser and a multilayer mirror imaging system we have studied hydrodynamic imprinting of laser speckle pattern on directly driven thin foils with 1-2 μm spatial resolution. Taking advantage of recently developed multilayer beamsplitters we have constructed and used a Mach-Zehnder interferometer operating at 155 Å to probe 1-3 mm size laser produced plasmas with peak electron densities of 4 × 1021cm−3. A comparison of our results with computer simulations will be presented.
