Experimental investigations of multicharged ion fluxes from laser-produced plasmas

A summary of experimental investigations of multicharged ions in the far expansion zone at about 2-3 m, generated from laser-produced plasmas, is presented. The results have been obtained on different laser systems with different wavelengths lambda, laser pulse lengths tau and laser energies E. As the targets, the following materials have been used: Al, Cu, Fe, Mo, Ta, Pt, and Pb. In the experiments, we have applied mutually complementary sets of corpuscular diagnostics: charge collectors, an electrostatic ion analyser and Thomson parabola mass spectrograph. It is shown that laser-created plasma can deliver ions with charge states z from 1 to about 50, atomic masses A from 1 to about 200 amu and energies from hundreds of electronvolts to several megaelectronvolts.