Study of rapid ionisation for simulation of soft X-ray lasers with the 2D hydro-radiative code ARWEN

Abstract

We present our fast ionisation routine used to study transient softX-raylasers with ARWEN, a two-dimensional hydrodynamic code incorporating adaptative mesh refinement (AMR) and radiative transport.

We compute global rates between ion stages assuming an effective temperature between singly-excited levels of each ion. A two-step method is used to obtain in a straightforward manner the variation of ion populations over long hydrodynamic time steps. We compare our model with existing theoretical results both stationary and transient, finding that the discrepancies are moderate except for large densities. We simulate an existing Molybdenum Ni-like transient softX-raylaser with ARWEN. Use of the fast ionisation routine leads to a larger increase in temperature and a larger gain zone than when LTE datatables are used.