Long Living Hot and Dense Plasma from Relativistic Laser-Nanowire Array Interaction
Abstract
Long-living, hot and dense plasmas generated by ultra-intense laser beams are of critical importance for laser-driven nuclear physics, bright hard X-ray sources, and laboratory astrophysics. We report the experimental observation of plasmas with nanosecond-scale lifetimes, near-solid density, and keV-level temperatures, produced by irradiating periodic arrays of composite nanowires with ultra-high contrast, relativistically intense femtosecond laser pulses. Jet-like plasma structures extending up to 1~mm from the nanowire surface were observed, emitting K-shell radiation from He-like Ti ions. High-resolution X-ray spectra were analyzed using 3D Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations of the laser-plasma interaction combined with collisional--radiative modeling (FLYCHK). The results indicate that the jets consist of plasma with densities of - cm and keV-scale temperatures, persisting for several nanoseconds. We attribute the formation of these jets to the generation of kiloTesla-scale global magnetic fields during the laser interaction, as predicted by PIC simulations. These fields may drive long-timescale current instabilities that sustain magnetic fields of several hundred tesla, sufficient to confine hot, dense plasma over nanosecond durations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.09437,
title = {Long Living Hot and Dense Plasma from Relativistic Laser-Nanowire Array Interaction},
author = {Ehsan Eftekhari-Zadeh and Mikhail Gyrdymov and Parysatis Tavana and Robert Loetzsch and Ingo Uschmann and Thomas Siefke and Thomas Käsebier and Uwe Zeitner and Adriana Szeghalmi and Alexander Pukhov and Dmitri Serebryakov and Evgeni Nerush and Igor Kostyukov and Olga Rosmej and Christian Spielmann and Daniil Kartashov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.09437},
year = {2025}
}