Experimental study of a subpicosecond pulse laser interacting with metallic and dielectric targets.

A simple similarity model is presented to study the hydrodynamics of transient collisional excitation nickellike x-ray lasers. Scaling laws for the temperature, scale length, and electron density are obtained by analytic derivation. The hydrodynamic characteristics of transient Ni-like Pd x-ray lasers are investigated using this model. The calculations agree well with Dunn's experimental results.