Determination of the Electron Temperature of a Hot Gold Plasma Utilizing High-Resolution X-Ray Spectroscopy of the L-Band Emission

The x-ray emission of high--temperature plasmas contains a wealth of information about the plasma conditions. A plasma parameters of interest is the electron temperature, which can be determined from the distribution of the ionic species in the plasma. Each ion charge distribution emits a characteristic x-- ray spectrum and, thus, high-resolution x--ray spectroscopy provides a tool to observe this characteristic ``fingerprint''. The ``L--band'' spectrometer was designed to determine the electron temperatures in laser--heated gold hohlraums by measuring the 3d --- 2p transitions in highly charged gold ions. Recent L--band measurements at the OMEGA laser facility on high--temperature hohlraums will be presented and compared to LASNEX calculations.