Experimental investigations of multicharged ion fluxes from laser-produced plasmas

A summary of experimental investigations of multicharged ions in the far expansion zone at about 2–3 m, generated from laser-produced plasmas, is presented. The results have been obtained on different laser systems with different wavelengths λ, laser pulse lengths τ and laser 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 collectors, an electrostatic ion analyser and Thomson parabola mass spectrograph. It is shown that laser-created plasma can deliver ions with charge states z from 1 to about 50, atomic masses A from 1 to about 200 amu and energies from hundreds of electronvolts to several megaelectronvolts.