Recombination effects in an expanding laser-produced plasma

The expansion of a laser-produced Be plasma is studied by comparing hydrodynamical model calculations with experimentally measured distributions of each charge state as a function of energy. The plasma is generated with 1–10-J 200-ps pulses from the LPARL Nd-glass laser facility, and the distributions are obtained using a Thomson parabolic spectrograph. The hydrodynamic equations include flux-limited thermal conductivity and collisional-radiative recombination and ionization. For the proper choice of the initial parameters, we obtain qualitative agreement between the model prediction and the experimentally measured distributions.