Observation of shells in Coulomb explosions of rare-gas clusters

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The explosions of noble gas clusters from argon and xenon irradiated by intense 35-fs infrared laser pulses have been studied. The kinetic energy spectra of ions produced in small clusters (700 atoms) show a two-mode shell structure that is attributed to originating from a radial charge distribution. With a simple classical particle simulation of Coulomb explosions, the energy structure was reproduced using information on the arrangement of charge in the cluster. It was found that, during the explosion, the inner atoms of the clusters were less ionized than the outer atoms.