Dynamics and control of shock shells in the coulomb explosion of very large deuterium clusters

The explosion dynamics of very large (approximately 10(6)-10(7) atoms) deuterium clusters irradiated by ultraintense laser pulses (I approximately 10(18) W/cm(2)) is analyzed self-consistently with one-to-one three-dimensional and two-dimensional fully relativistic particle-in-cell simulations. Small-scale shock shells in the expanding ion cloud are observed. A technique to induce the formation of large shock shells inside a single cluster, increasing the probability of intracluster nuclear reactions, is proposed and demonstrated.