Coupled electron and atomic kinetics through the solution of the Boltzmann equation for generating time-dependent X-ray spectra

In this work, we present a model that solves self-consistently the electron and atomic kinetics to characterize highly non-equilibrium plasmas, in particular for those systems where both the electron distribution function is far from Maxwellian and the evolution of the ion level populations are dominated by time-dependent atomic kinetics. In this model, level populations are obtained from a detailed collisional-radiative model where collision rates are computed from a time varying electron distribution function obtained from the solution of the zero-dimensional Boltzmann equation. The Boltzmann collision term includes the effects of electron-electron collisions, electron collisional ionization, excitation and de-excitation. An application for Heα spectra from a short pulse laser irradiated argon cluster target will be shown to illustrate the results of our model.