Separation of ion component from solid hydrocarbon materials by laser ablation

Abstract

Plasma usually consists of multiple ion component. Ion-component separation occurs in various conditions, and profoundly affects the plasma dynamic evolution. In this work, ion-component separation in two-ion-component plasma is investigated in the hydrodynamic condition. Starting from the Landau-Fokker-Planck equations of two-ion-component plasma, the ion transport equations are reduced through the Chapman-Enskog approach. The transport equations are then transformed into a set of linear algebraic equations and solved by expanding the perturbed ion distribution functions into the series of Sonine polynomials. The diffusive ion mass flows with inclusion of baro-diffusion, thermo-diffusion and electro-diffusion are thus obtained. With these efforts, the complete ion fluid equations are presented, which can be used to describe the processes of ion-component separation. We evaluate ion-component separation in the case of a solid CH plate target ablated with a laser pulse, by solving the ion diffusion equation with the hydro states output from the one-dimensional radiative hydro code Multi-1D. The simulation results show that ion-component separation mainly occurs around ablation front and under-dense region, and that the effect of ion-species separation on plasma hydrodynamic evolution is minor and can be neglected. For those physical processes sensitive to ion concentration such as Thomson scattering, however, the effect of ion-component separation is significant, which means that ion-component separation should be included in the study of laser plasma interaction.