Maximum material thickness for extreme ultra-violet and X-ray backlighter probing of dense plasma

Extreme ultra-violet (EUV) lasers, X-ray lasers and other backlighter sources can be used to probe high-energy density materials if their brightness can overcome self-emission from the material. We investigate the maximum plasma thickness of aluminum, silicon and iron that can be probed with EUV or X-ray photons of energy 89–1243 eV before self-emission from the plasma overwhelms the backlighter output. For a uniform plasma, backlighter transmission decreases exponentially with increasing thickness of the material following Beer's law at a rate dependent on the plasma opacity. We evaluate the plasma opacity with the Los Alamos TOPS opacity data. The self-emission is assumed to be either that of a black body to arise from a plasma in LTE or to only consist of free–free and free–bound emission. It is shown that at higher plasma temperature (?40 eV), EUV radiation (e.g. photon energy=89 eV) can probe a greater thickness of plasma than X-ray radiation (e.g. photon energy=1243 eV).