Heating and Ionization Dynamics in Solid Density Plasmas Driven by Ultra-short Relativistic Lasers

The dynamics of heating and ionization, which determines the crucial plasma parameters such as temperature, free electron density and so on, is one of the fundamental issues in the realm of ultra-short relativistic laser-solid target interactions. We present our work on investigation of heating and ionization dynamics in solid copper target irradiated by ultra-short intense laser using two dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. The simulation results show that the bulk electron temperature is very sensitive to the initial preplasma scale length. By varying the preplasma scale length from 0 to 0.1 λ_0, the bulk electron temperatures in the interest of region increase from ~26 eV to ~109 eV, which agrees very well with the theory based on Ohmic heating mechanism by treating the return current correctly. The bulk electron heating is finally translated into bulk ionization, which leads to the average Cu ion charge state increasing from ~4.3 to ~10.7.