Study of plasma pressure evolution driven by strong picosecond laser pulse

Through one dimensional relativistic particle-in-cell simulation of strong laser interaction with the solid-density plasma, the evolution of the plasma impact pressure behind a thin foil has been investigated in details. An energy-compression mechanism has been proposed to help optimizing the laser and plasma parameters. It has been found that by using a picosecond laser with intensity 10¹⁵Wcm^-2, an impact pressure as high as several hundreds of GPa order of magnitude can be obtained. The numerical analysis demonstrates that the peak pressure is mainly resulted from the ion contribution. These results are of potential application to the laser loading upon solids in order to study the material properties under extra-high dynamic pressure.