ABSTRACT
In recent years there has been significant interest in the emission spectra from high-density plasmas, as manifested by a number of experiments. At these high densities short range (small impact parameter) interactions become important and these cannot be adequately handled by the standard theory, whose predictions depend on some cutoffs, necessary to preserve unitarity, the long range approximation, and to ensure the validity of a semiclassical picture. Very recently, as a result of a debate concerning the broadening of isolated ion lines, the importance of penetration of bound electron wave functions by plasma electrons has been realized. By softening the interaction, penetration makes perturbative treatments more valid. The penetration effect has now been included analytically into the standard theory. It turns out that the integrations may be done in closed form in terms of the modified Bessel functions K0 and K1. This work develops the new theory and applies it to experimental measurements.
ABSTRACT
We report the first experimental observation of charge-exchange-caused dips (also called x dips) in spectral lines of multicharged ions in laser-produced plasmas. Specifically, in the process of a laser irradiation of targets made out of aluminum carbide, we observed two x dips in the Ly(gamma) line of Al XIII perturbed by fully stripped carbon. From the practical point of view, this opens up a way to experimentally produce not-yet-available fundamental data on charge exchange between multicharged ions, virtually inaccessible by other experimental methods. From the theoretical viewpoint, the results are important because the x dips are the only one signature of charge exchange in profiles of spectral lines emitted by plasmas and they are the only one quasimolecular phenomenon that could be observed at relatively "low" densities of laser-produced plasmas.
