Absorption of laser light in overdense plasmas by sheath inverse bremsstrahlung

摘要

The original sheath inverse bremsstrahlung model (P. J. Catto and R. M. More, 1977) is modified by including the vxB term in the equation of motion. It is shown that the present results axe significantly different from those derived without the vxB term. The vxB term is also important in interpreting the absorption mechanism. If the vxB term were neglected, the absorption of the light would be incorrectly interpreted as an increase in the transverse electron temperature. This would violate the conservation of the transverse components of the canonical momentum, in the case of a normally incident laser light. It is also shown that both the sheath inverse bremsstrahlung and the anomalous skin effect are limiting cases of the same collisionless absorption mechanism. Finally, results from PIC plasma simulations are compared with the absorption coefficient calculated from the linear theory.