The first International Conference on the Frontiers of Plasma Physics and Technology was organized in Bangalore, India during December 9–14, 2002. More than 100 delegates from all the continents participated in the conference and about half the delegates were from overseas. This Forum specially encouraged the young researchers to present their work and exchange ideas with experts. This conference which was inter-disciplinary in nature, brought several plasma physicists and technologists to a common platform to discuss the research and applications useful for the advancement of the present society.

This issue of Laser and Particle Beams contains 27 contributed articles based on presentations given at the eighth International Workshop on the Physics of Compressible Turbulent Mixing (IWPCTM) (see http://www.llnl.gov/IWPCTM), held at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California from December 9 to 14, 2001, and organized jointly by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the California Institute of Technology. This conference is the eighth in a biennial series of conferences on the general subject of experimental, numerical, and theoretical studies of compressible turbulent mixing, initiated by LLNL in the late 1980s. Previous conferences were held in Princeton, New Jersey (1988), Pleasanton, California (1989), Royaumont, France (1991), Cambridge, United Kingdom (1993), Stony Brook, New York (1995), Marseille, France (1997), and St. Petersburg, Russia (1999). The ninth IWPCTM is to be held at the University of Cambridge in 2004.

The article presents the results of the experimental research on precision measurement of total stopping range and energy deposition function of intermediate and heavy ion beams in cold solid matter. The “thick target” method proves to be appropriate for this purpose. Two types of detectors were developed which provide an error of the total stopping range measurement of less than 3% and of the beam energy deposition function of about 7%. The experiments with 58Ni+26, 197Au+65, and 238U+72 ion beams in the energy range 100–300 MeV/u were performed on SIS-18 (Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt) in 1999–2001. The measured data on the total stopping ranges for the above ion species in bulk and foiled Al and Cu targets are presented. The investigation showed that there is a noticeable discrepancy between the measured stopping ranges and the theoretically predicted ones. Also, it was shown that realistic ion energy deposition depends on the type of target (bulk or foiled). Further investigation is necessary to clarify the latter.

It is my pleasure to present the Special Issue of Laser and Particle Beams devoted to the 25th anniversary of the Institute of High Current Electronics (IHCE) of the Russian Academy of Sciences Siberian Division.

This paper reviews the physical phenomena that accompany the emission of electrons and ions from plasma. The development of plasma emission electronics as an independent research field is closely associated with the name of its founder, Professor Kreindel Yu. E. The well-known advantages of plasma electron emitters (plasma cathodes) are the higher emission current density, the pulsed emission capability, and the wider range of residual gas pressures. A peculiar property of the plasma cathode is the possibility of extracting practically all electrons from plasma. The parameters of an ion and electron beam extracted from plasma carry information about the physical processes occurring in the plasma. This makes it possible to invoke emission methods to study the fundamental phenomena that take place in plasma of vacuum arc and low-pressures gas discharges.

Directed energy and turbulence structure are shown to be crucial in understanding the growth of self-similar Rayleigh–Taylor and incompressible Richtmyer–Meshkov turbulent mixing zones. Averaging over the mixing zone is used to analyze the response of a modified k–ε model and a turbulent two-fluid model. Three different transport regimes are then identified by considering self-similar variable acceleration RT flows (SSVARTs), which appear as promising reference flows for model testing.

Shock pressure generated in aluminum targets due to the interaction of 0.44 μm (3 ω of iodine laser) laser radiation has been studied. The laser intensity profile was smoothed using phase zone plates. Aluminum step targets were irradiated at an intensity I ≈ 1014 W/cm2. Shock velocity in the aluminum target was estimated by detecting the shock luminosity from the target rear using a streak camera to infer the shock pressure. Experimental results show a good agreement with the theoretical model based on the delocalized laser absorption approximation. In the present report, we explicitly discuss the importance of target thickness on the shock pressure scaling.

The interaction process between fast heavy ions and dense plasma was experimentally investigated. We injected 4.3-MeV/u or 6.0-MeV/u iron ions into a z-pinch-discharge helium plasma and measured the energy loss of the ions by the time of flight method. The energy loss of 4.3-MeV/u ions fairly agreed with theoretical prediction when the electron density of the target was on the order of 1018 cm−3. With increasing electron density beyond 1019 cm−3, the difference between the experiment and the theory became remarkable; the experimental energy loss was 15% larger than the theoretical value at the peak density. For 6.0-MeV/u ions, the deviation from the theory appeared even at densities below 1019 cm−3. These discrepancies indicated that density effects such as ladderlike ionization caused the enhancement of the projectile mean charge in the target.

This paper is devoted to the engineering embodiment of the modern methods for producing charged ion and electron beams by extracting them from the plasma of a discharge. Electron beams use to execute electron-beam welding, annealing, and surface heating of materials and to realize plasmochemical reactions stimulated by fast electrons. Ion beams allow realization of technologies of ion implantation or ion-assisted deposition of coatings thereby opening new prospects for the creation of compounds and alloys by the method that makes it possible to obtain desired parameters and functional properties of the surface. A detailed description is given to the performance and design of devices producing beams of this type: the ion and electron sources being developed at the laboratory of plasma sources of the Institute of High-Current Electronics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the laboratory of plasma electronics of Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics.

The final beam transport in the reactor chamber for heavy ion fusion in preformed plasma channels offers many attractive advantages compared to other transport modes. In the past few years, experiments at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) accelerator facility have addressed the creation and investigation of discharge plasmas, designed for the transport of intense ion beams. Stable, self-standing channels of 50 cm length with currents up to 55 kA were initiated in low-pressure ammonia gas by a CO2-laser pulse along the channel axis before the discharge is triggered. The channels were characterized by several plasma diagnostics including interferometry and spectroscopy. We also present first experiments on laser-guided intersecting discharges.

An accurate turbulent mixing model for gravitationally induced instabilities with arbitrarily variable accelerations has been developed to capture the following physical aspects: (1) directed transport, (2) correct buoyancy forces, (3) turbulence diffusion, and (4) geometrical aspects. We present the two-structure two-fluid two-turbulence concept (2SFK), which consistently answers these requirements by identifying the large-scale transport structures in a statistical approach. An example of a 2SFK-based model is given and applied to the Rayleigh–Taylor case.

Optical field ionization is the earliest and fastest plasma-generating process during the interaction of intense laser light with matter. By using short and rapidly rising laser pulses, the free electron density may turn from being transparent for an incoming laser pulse to reflective in less than half a laser cycle, that is, on a subfemtosecond timescale. Extremely nonlinear optical effects arise as a consequence of this. In this article, the basics of optical field ionization that are relevant in analytical or numerical studies of intense laser–matter interactions are reviewed. Several macroscopic effects of field ionization in the interaction of intense laser pulses with solid targets are briefly surveyed.

This article reviews experiments on the production of low-energy, high-current electron beams (LEHCEB) and their use for surface modification of materials. It is shown that electron guns with a plasma anode and an explosive emission cathode are most promising for the production of this type of beams. The problems related to the initiation of explosive emission and the production and transportation of LEHCEBs in plasma-filled diodes are considered. It has been shown that if the rise time of the accelerating voltage is comparable to or shorter than the time it takes for an ion to fly through the space charge layer, the electric field strength at the cathode and the electron current density in the layer are increased. Experimentally, it has been established that the current of the beam transported in the plasma channel is 1–2 orders of magnitude greater than the critical Pierce current and several times greater than the chaotic current of the anode plasma electrons. Methods for improving the uniformity of the energy density distribution over the beam cross section are described. The nonstationary temperature and stress fields formed in metal targets have been calculated. The features of the structure-phase transformations in the surface layers of materials irradiated with LEHCEBs have been considered. It has been demonstrated that in the surface layers quenched from the liquid state, nonequilibrium structure-phase states are formed.

A perturbation method in which only the most secular terms are retained gives simple results for the weakly nonlinear growth of a single-mode shock-accelerated interface (Vandenboomgaerde et al., 2002). This result can be written as a series in integer powers of time. It can be considered as the Taylor expansion of an analytic function. We believe that an approximation of such a function has been identified; it described the evolution of the instability from linear to intermediate nonlinear regime. Furthermore, this function has no singularity. The relevance of this analytic formula is checked against two-dimensional simulations and experimental data.

A systematic investigation of the longitudinal fields excited in a plasma by a short, dense beam of positrons is carried out using two-dimensional, cylindrical geometry, particle-in-cell code simulations. In particular, we examine the behavior of the accelerating and decelerating fields of the wakefield as a function of beam charge, radius, length, and plasma density. The parameters are chosen to be consistent with those employed in current and future experiments designed to elucidate the physics of positron beam–plasma interactions.

We consider beams that are described by a four-dimensional (4D) transverse distribution f (x, y, x′, y′), where x′ ≡ px /pz and z is the axial coordinate. A two-slit scanner is commonly employed to measure, over a sequence of shots, a two-dimensional (2D) projection of such a beam's phase space, for example, f (x, x′). Another scanner might yield f (y, y′) or, using crossed slits, f (x, y). A small set of such 2D scans does not uniquely specify f (x, y, x′, y′). We have developed “tomographic” techniques to synthesize a “reasonable” set of particles in a 4D phase space having 2D densities consistent with the experimental data. We briefly summarize one method and describe progress in validating it, using simulations of the High Current Experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Ion–electron two-stream instabilities in high intensity heavy ion fusion beams, described self-consistently by the nonlinear Vlasov–Maxwell equations, are studied using a three-dimensional multispecies perturbative particle simulation method. Large-scale parallel particle simulations are carried out using the recently developed Beam Equilibrium, Stability, and Transport (BEST) code. For a parameter regime characteristic of heavy ion fusion drivers, simulation results show that the most unstable mode of the ion–electron two-stream instability has a dipole-mode structure, and the linear growth rate decreases with increasing axial momentum spread of the beam particles due to Landau damping by the axial momentum spread of the beam ions in the longitudinal direction.

This article describes S-band sources of high-power microwave (HPM) pulses: a resonant backward wave oscillator (BWO) producing ∼5-GW, 100-J pulses, based on the SINUS-7 electron accelerator, and a double-section vircator with a peak power of ∼1 GW and a pulse width of 20–50 ns, powered from either the SINUS-7 accelerator or the MARINA inductive-store pulse driver with a fuse opening switch.

The simplified perturbation method of Vandenboomgaerde et al. (2002) is applied to both the Richtmyer–Meshkov and the Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities. This theory is devoted to the calculus of the growth rate of the perturbation of the interface in the weakly nonlinear stage. In the standard approach, expansions appear to be series in time. We build accurate approximations by retaining only the terms with the highest power in time. This simplifies and accelerates the solution. High order expressions are then easily reachable. For the Richtmyer–Meshkov instability, multimode configurations become tractable and the selection mode process can be studied. Inferences for the intermediate nonlinear regime are also proposed. In particular, a class of homothetic configurations is inferred; its validity is verified with numerical simulations even as vortex structures appear at the interface. This kind of method can also be used for the Rayleigh–Taylor instability. Some examples are presented.

Popular target designs are reviewed. Possible methods of fusion target fabrication are discussed and the equipment and samples are demonstrated. The properties of the uniform and structured (cluster) materials are considered, showing the advantage of cluster material for energy conversion into soft X rays. The target materials with high content of hydrogen isotopes (BeD2, LiBeD3, or ND3BD3) prove to be more effective for high-power drivers in comparison with beryllium or polyimide.