X-ray lasers for plasma diagnostics

Summary form only given, as follows. Soft X-ray lasers have evolved from the early demonstration phase to becoming reliable XUV sources. They operate over a wide wavelength range extending from 35 to 400 /spl Aring/ and have output energies as high as 10 mJ in 150 ns pulses. The beam divergence of these lasers is less than 15 mrad and they have a typical linewidth of /spl Delta//spl lambda///spl lambda//spl sim/10/sup 4/ making them the brightest XUV sources available. I describe our use of X-ray lasers to probe high density plasmas using a variety of diagnostic techniques. Taking advantage of recently developed multilayer beamsplitters we have constructed and used a Mach-Zehnder interferometer operating at 155 /spl Aring/ to probe 1-3 mm size laser produced plasmas. We have also used X-ray lasers and a multilayer mirror imaging systems to study hydrodynamic imprinting of laser speckle pattern on directly driven thin foils with 1-2 /spl mu/m spatial resolution. We are now planning a moire deflectometry to measure the electron density profile in ICF hohlraums. The results of these experiments and the limitations of these techniques will be presented.