Thermal effects in intense laser-plasma interactions

We present an overview of a new warm fluid model that incorporates leading-order kinetic corrections to the cold fluid model without making any near-equilibrium assumptions, in the quasi-static limit we obtain analytical expressions for the momentum spread and show excellent agreement with solutions of the full time-dependant equations. It is shown that over a lame range of initial plasma temperatures, the fields are relatively insensitive to the pressure force. We discussion implications of this work for model validation.