Fig. 1. The temperature of plasma versus laser propagation depth inside plasma for the incident planar flat-top RHCP laser with duration of 1 ns except for the red solid curve of 10 ns. Parameters of the two identical black curves in (a) and (b): laser wavelength of , intensity of , duration of ns, plasma density of , initial plasma temperature of keV and magnetic field of T. Each of the other six colourful curves has one of the above parameters being changed, that is, (a) ns (red, solid), (blue, solid), T (green, solid) and T (orange, solid); (b) (red, dotted), eV (blue, dotted) and (green, dotted).

Fig. 2. Heating of plasma with different densities by laser and Nd:YAG laser with , ns and keV. (a) Plasma temperature at the vacuum–plasma boundary versus plasma density: , T (black) and , T (red). (b) Averaged heating depth versus plasma density: , T (black) and , T (red), where the dots denote simulated depth and the lines denote the fitted curve.

Fig. 3. Heating of various plasmas by laser. (a) The uniform plasma is similar to the compressed plasma in Gotchev et al.^[11], with (blue) or (orange), ns, T and keV. (b) Sandwiched target with plasma densities of ( and ) and (blue) or (yellow) (), where , ns, keV and T.

Table 1. Power transmission of the laser (Trans.), increase of plasma temperature at the vacuum–plasma boundary (), averaged heating depth in micrometres () and energy conversion efficiency from laser to plasma () versus various parameters, where means ‘increase with’, means ‘decrease with’ and means ‘not sensitive to’.