Xiayun Pan

Abstract Heating and ionization are among the most fundamental processes in relativistic laser–solid interactions; however, their spatiotemporal evolution remains challenging to capture experimentally. Here we present detailed diagnosis of high-intensity laser interactions with wire targets, leveraging the extreme spectral brightness of an X-ray free-electron laser in sub-picosecond time-resolved resonant X-ray emission spectroscopy and absorption imaging.

We present a newly developed ray tracing code called mmpxrt, dedicated to study and design X-ray crystal optics, with a special focus on mosaic crystal spectrometers. Its main advantage over other currently available ray tracing codes is that it includes a detailed and benchmarked algorithm to treat mosaic crystals, especially HOPG and HAPG (Highly Oriented/Annealed Pyrolitic Graphite).

Abstract Ultra-intense lasers that ionize atoms and accelerate electrons in solids to near the speed of light can lead to kinetic instabilities that alter the laser absorption and subsequent electron transport, isochoric heating, and ion acceleration. These instabilities can be difficult to characterize, but X-ray scattering at keV photon energies allows for their visualization with femtosecond temporal resolution on the few nanometer mesoscale.