Laser plasma diagnostics of dense plasmas

The authors describe several experiments on Nova that use laser-produced plasmas to generate x-rays capable of backlighting dense, cold plasmas (p {approximately} 1--3 gm/cm{sup 3}, kT {approximately} 5--10 eV, and areal density {rho}{ell}{approximately} 0.01--0.05 g/cm{sup 2}). The x-rays used vary over a wide range of h{nu}, from 80 eV (X-ray laser) to 9 keV. This allows probing of plasmas relevant to many hydrodynamic experiments. Typical diagnostics are 100 ps pinhole framing cameras for a long pulse backlighter and a time-integrated CCD camera for a short pulse backlighter.