Short soft x-ray sources

In this work we report on the characterization of pulsed soft x-rays emitted from laser-produced plasma. The plasma was generated by a pulsed KrF excimer laser focused on pure Si, Cu and Ta targets by 40, 80 and 120 mJ laser energies. The utilized detector was a very sensitive Faraday cup which opportunely biased was able to record time-resolved signals of x-rays and to estimate their energy. The found x-rays energy values were compared with the ion temperature of the plasma obtained by fitting the time-resolved ion current signals with a shifted Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution. The results showed that the laser-produced Ta plasma induced bunches of x-rays having in average the highest energy values and it was also characterized by ion temperature higher than the ones of the laser-produced Si and Cu plasmas. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.