Enhanced x-ray bremsstahlung emission from xenon plasmas irradiated by an intense KrF laser

Summary form only given. In a series of experiments, xenon clusters were exposed to an intense 248 nm KrF laser pulse and produced amplified x-ray emission of ~2.8 Å. We previously demonstrated that a candidate mechanism for this x-ray amplification is through population inversions generated from the hole states in Co-and Fe-like xenon. In this earlier work, the photoionization rates used to produce the hole states were free parameters whose magnitudes were central to the x-ray gain coefficient calculations. An, as yet, unanswered question, which we address in this talk, is by what mechanism active in the gas of exploding xenon clusters could inversion and gain be generated? In the work of Lebed and Roshchupkin in, enhancements to bremsstrahlung in the presence of intense optical fields in excess of 10⁴ were produced. Motivated by this work we chose a modeling approach that employed photoionization rather than collisional ionization rates. In this talk, we show that the bremsstrahlung enhancements demonstrated in are needed in order to be consistent with the photoionization rates used in.