Recent progress of laboratory astrophysics with intense lasers

Abstract

Thanks to a rapid progress of high-power lasers soon after the birth of laser by T. H. Maiman in 1960, intense lasers have been developed mainly for studying scientific feasibility of the laser fusion in the world wide. Inertial confinement fusion with intense laser has attracted attention as a new future energy after two oil crises from 1970s -1980s. From the beginning, the most challenging physics is known to be the hydrodynamic instability to realize the spherical implosion to achieve more than 1000 times the solid density. A lot of studies have been carried out theoretically and experimentally on the hydrodynamic instability and resultant turbulent mixing of compressible fluids. During such activities in laboratory, the explosion of supernova SN1987A was observed in the sky on February 23, 1987. The x-ray satellites have revealed that the hydrodynamic instability is a key issue to understand the physics of supernova explosion. After strong interaction of laser plasma researchers and astrophysicists, the laboratory astrophysics with intense lasers has been proposed and promoted around the end of 1990s. The original subject was mainly related to hydrodynamic instabilities. However, after two decades of the laboratory astrophysics research, we can now find a diversity of its research topics. It has been demonstrated that a variety of nonlinear physics of collisionless plasmas can be studied in laser ablation plasmas in the last decade theoretically and experimentally. In the present paper, we shed light on the recent ten topics intensively studied in laboratory experiments. Brief review is given by citing recent papers. Then, modeling cosmic-ray acceleration with lasers is reviewed in a following session as a special topic to be the coming main topics in laboratory astrophysics research.

Collective Thomson scattering in non-equilibrium laser produced two-stream plasmas

“…Substituting the dielectric function into the absolute value term in Eq. ( 2), we get (5) where x = (1 + χ i )/χ e . The peak is determined at the wavenumber with the smallest denominator in Eq.…”

“…The peak is determined at the wavenumber with the smallest denominator in Eq. (5) where Re[x] ∼ −1 and Im[x] ∼ 0 are satisfied.…”

“…However, it is difficult to observe the multiscale nature of collisionless shocks in space and astrophysical plasmas; it is challenging to obtain the images of shocks by or with spacecrafts in space plasmas, while there are no in-situ observations of distribution functions in astrophysical plasmas. Recently, collisionless shocks have been studied with laboratory experiments, which have a potential to measure both global and local information simultaneously 5,6 .…”

Particle trajectories, gamma-ray emission, and anomalous radiative trapping effects in magnetic dipole wave

“…Currently, actively developing multipetawatt laser facilities [1] can become a unique tool for studying the properties of quantum vacuum and quantum electrodynamics (QED) processes in extremely strong fields [2,3], as well as for modeling astrophysical phenomena in laboratory conditions [4][5][6]. Previously, the main attention has been paid to optimal configurations of the multibeam laser setup in which the electric field attains the maximal value.…”

Accurate temperature diagnostics for matter under extreme conditions

“…On Earth, WDM can nowadays be realized experimentally at large research facilities using different techniques 12 , and particularly advantageous photon properties are offered by x-ray free electron lasers such as LCLS, European XFEL, or SACLA [13][14][15] . This opens up enticing new possibilities for laboratory astrophysics 16 , the discovery of novel materials 17,18 , and hotelectron chemistry 19 . Consequently, a number of experimental breakthroughs 17,18,[20][21][22][23] have been reported over the last years.…”