Beam optics of exploding foil plasma x-ray lasers

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Abstract
In soft x‐ray lasers, amplification is achieved as the x rays propagate down a long narrow plasma column. Refraction, due to electron density gradients, tends to direct the x‐rays out of high density regions. This can have the undesirable effect of shortening the distance that the x ray stay within the plasma, thereby limiting the amount of amplification. The exploding foil design lessens refraction, but does not eliminate it. In this paper, a quantitative analysis of propagation and amplification in an exploding foil x‐ray laser is presented. The density and gain profiles within the plasma are modeled in an approximate manner, which enables considerable analytic progress. It is found that refraction introduces a loss term to the laser amplification. The beam pattern from a parabolic gain profile laser has a dominant peak on the x‐ray laser axis. The pattern from a quartic gain profile having a dip on‐axis can produce a profile with off‐axis peaks, in better agreement with recent experimental data.

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