Astrophysics with intense and ultra-intense lasers "laser astrophysics"

Abstract

I review the present status of laser astrophysics research in which the intense and ultra-intense lasers are used to study basic data of hot-dense plasmas, violent phenomena such as explosion scaled down in laboratory with appropriate similarity law, and advanced physics such as anti-matter plasmas. The author's original discipline, laser fusion, requires studying the physics of high-energy density (HED) plasmas. Modern astrophysics also needs the maturity of HED physics. I briefly review the physics scenario of laser fusion and divide it to six subjects. They are (1) Laser plasma interaction, (2) Electron energy transport, (3) Hydrodynamics and strong shocks, (4) Hydrodynamic instability, (5) Atomic physics and X-ray transport, and (6) Laser-produced relativistic plasmas. The author proposed to introduce three views to consider and pick up model experiments suggested from each topics in laser fusion. They are (1) Sameness, (2) Similarity, and (3) Resemblance. The matrix made of six rows of the subjects of laser fusion and three columns of three views gave us at the present time fifteen subjects of laser astrophysics. These fifteen topics include, for example, the equation of state and opacity of the hot-dense plasmas, topics related to supernova explosions, and relativistic electron-positron plasma jets seen in active galactic nuclei. The detailed explanation on astrophysical interest and possible model experiments for each topics is given in the present paper. I hope that this paper will motivate the readers to think and find a variety of new topics and the matrix table becomes black with many new key words.