EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS OF MULTICHARGED ION FLUXES FROM LASER-PRODUCED PLASMAS

A summary of experimental investigations of multicharged ions in the f ar expansion zone at about 2-3 m, generated from laser-produced plasma s, is presented. The results have been obtained on different laser sys tems with different wavelengths lambda, laser pulse lengths tau and la ser energies E. As the targets, the following materials have been used : Al, Cu, Fe, Mo, Ta, Pt, and Pb. In the experiments, we have applied mutually complementary sets of corpuscular diagnostics: charge collect ors, an electrostatic ion analyser and Thomson parabola mass spectrogr aph. It is shown that laser-created plasma can deliver ions with charg e states z from 1 to about 50, atomic masses A from 1 to about 200 amu and energies from hundreds of electronvolts to several megaelectronvo lts.