A MODEL FOR THE SIMULATION OF NONEQUILIBRIUM LINE TRANSFER IN LABORATORY PLASMAS

A numerical model for the simulation of emission spectra of laboratory plasmas is presented. A special attention has been focused on the coupling between the line transfer and the ionic populations. This coupling is carried out by an iterative procedure, where, given the temperature, density, and velocity profiles of a plasma, the populations are obtained by linearization while the line transfer is computed within the core saturation approximation and with complete frequency redistribution. This procedure has been developed along with a collisional-radiative model for K-shell spectroscopy. As an application, the emission of a laser-created aluminum plasma was calculated, and the spectra of radiation emerging from different emission zones were accordingly computed. It is found that an accurate evaluation of line intensities involves a computation of line transfer, taking into account the macroscopic Doppler shift.