Beam generated ablation pressure

The theoretical basis of ablative pressure generation is presented and discussed for laser, ion and X-ray beams. With lasers a comparison is made with experimental results and an excellent agreement was found without fitting any free parameters. It results that heat flow into the corona and ponderomotive profile steepening effects are thereby essential. At superhigh intensities the plasma pressure still plays an important role and cannot be omitted in favour of the radiation pressure. In the lower Mbar pressure domain ion beams may compete with the laser and are expected to offer some net advantages.