The Effect of Wedge Angle on the Evolution of a Stagnation Layer in a Colliding Plasma Experiment

Colliding plasmas are steadily gaining significance in hohlraum studies, pulsed laser deposition and laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy for a number of reasons, not least the levels of control they offer over the properties of the slab of plasma that accumulates at the collision front, i.e. the stagnation layer. We present here some results of a time and space resolved optical-spectroscopic study of colliding plasmas formed at the front surfaces of flat and inclined Cu slab targets as a function of the wedge angle between them for angles ranging from 100(0) to 180(0) (i.e., laterally colliding plasmas). Presented here are the kinetics of atomic/ionic spatial distributions throughout the stagnation layers, both of which have been found to vary significantly with wedge angle.