Absorption of a high-power electromagnetic pulse of short duration by a dense plasma layer

The numerical experiment method has been employed in the study of a collision-free regime of interaction of an ultra-short high-power laser pulse with a surface plasma layer of a condensed target. The use was made of the $(1\frac22)$-dimensional discrete kinetic model of a nonrelativistic plasma with an ion background in the Darwin approximation for self-consistent electromagnetic fields. The behavior of the skin layer plasma has been found to differ substantially from the linear theory predictions. The average value of energy of electrons is comparable with their oscillation energy. The particles distribution function is highly anisotropic and differs significantly from the Maxwellian distribution.