LABORATORY HIGH-ENERGY ASTROPHYSICS ON LASERS

The tremendous range of temperatures and densities spanned by astrophysical plasmas has significant overlap with conditions attainable using high-power laser facilities. These facilities provide an opportunity to create, control, and characterize plasmas in the laboratory that mirror conditions in some of the most important cosmological systems. Moreover, laboratory experiments can enhance astrophysical understanding by focusing on and isolating important physical processes. without neccessarily reproducing the exact conditions of the integral system. Basic study of radiative properties, transport phenomena, thermodynamic response and hydrodynamic evolution in plasmas under properly scaled conditions leads both directly and indirectly to improved models of complex astrophysical systems. In this paper, we will discuss opportunities for current and planned high-power lasers to contribute to the study of high-energy astrophysics.