Kinetic modeling of x-ray laser-driven solid Al plasmas via particle-in-cell simulation.

Solid-density plasmas driven by intense x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) radiation are seeded by sources of nonthermal photoelectrons and Auger electrons that ionize and heat the target via collisions. Simulation codes that are commonly used to model such plasmas, such as collisional-radiative (CR) codes, typically assume a Maxwellian distribution and thus instantaneous thermalization of the source electrons. In this study, we present a detailed description and initial applications of a collisional particle-in-cell code, picls, that has been extended with a self-consistent radiation transport model and Monte Carlo models for photoionization and KLL Auger ionization, enabling the fully kinetic simulation of XFEL-driven plasmas. The code is used to simulate two experiments previously performed at the Linac Coherent Light Source investigating XFEL-driven solid-density Al plasmas. It is shown that picls-simulated pulse transmissions using the Ecker-Kröll continuum-lowering model agree much better with measurements than do simulations using the Stewart-Pyatt model. Good quantitative agreement is also found between the time-dependent picls results and those of analogous simulations by the CR code scfly, which was used in the analysis of the experiments to accurately reproduce the observed Kα emissions and pulse transmissions. Finally, it is shown that the effects of the nonthermal electrons are negligible for the conditions of the particular experiments under investigation.

Kinetic effects and nonlinear heating in intense x-ray-laser-produced carbon plasmas.

The x-ray laser-matter interaction for a low-Z material, carbon, is studied with a particle-in-cell code that solves the photoionization and x-ray transport self-consistently. Photoionization is the dominant absorption mechanism and nonthermal photoelectrons are produced with energy near the x-ray photon energy. The photoelectrons ionize the target rapidly via collisional impact ionization and field ionization, producing a hot plasma column behind the laser pulse. The radial size of the heated region becomes larger than the laser spot size due to the kinetic nature of the photoelectrons. The plasma can have a temperature of more than 10 000 K (>1eV), an energy density greater than 10^{4} J/cm^{3}, an ion-ion Coulomb coupling parameter Γ≥1, and electron degeneracy Θ≥1, i.e., strongly coupled warm dense matter. By increasing the laser intensity, the plasma temperature rises nonlinearly from tens of eV to hundreds of eV, bringing it into the high energy density matter regime. The heating depth and temperature are also controllable by changing the photon energy of the incident laser light.

Dispersive kinetics in discotic liquid crystals.

The dynamics of the discotic liquid-crystalline system, hexakis (n-hexyloxy) triphenylene (HAT6), is considered in the frame of the phenomenological model for rate processes proposed by Berlin. It describes the evolution of the system in the presence of the long-time scale correlations in the system, and we compare this with experimental quasielastic neutron scattering of the molecular assembly of HAT6 in the columnar phase. We interpret the parameters of this model in terms of nonextensive thermodynamics in which rare events in the local fast dynamics of some parts of the system control the slower dynamics of the larger molecular entity and lead to a fractional diffusion equation. The importance of these rare local events to the overall dynamics of the system is linked to the entropic index, this being obtained from the data within the model approach. Analysis of the waiting-time dependence from momentum transfer reveals a Lévy distribution of jump lengths, which allows us to construct the van Hove correlation function for discotic liquid-crystalline system.

Vasotocin improves intelligence and attention in mentally retarded children.

In mentally retarded (MR) prepubertal children, investigated both before and after six months of treatment, synthetic arginine vasotocin (AVT) (10(-6) mg/day/0.1 ml, intranasally), but not oxytocin or saline alone, significantly increased the intelligence quotient (IQ) and improved the attention parameters without affecting the short-term memory. Taking into account both the psychometric results and the clinical observations, the effects of AVT could be mainly explained by assuming the improvement of attention. Since there was a significant inverse correlation between the pretreatment levels of the IQ and attention scores and their increase after AVT, and since the AVT effects tend to be more intense in autistic children, we hypothesize that the more affected the attention mechanisms, the more they are sensitive to AVT. The present results are tentatively explained by the paradoxical sleep-enhancing properties of AVT, mechanisms by which AVT could improve the brain plasticity in MR subjects and by this, the attention performance.