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The creation of well-thermalized, hot and dense plasmas is attractive forwarm dense matter studies. We investigate collisionally induced energyabsorption of an ultraintense and ultrashort laser pulse in a solid coppertarget using particle-in-cell simulations. We find that, upon irradiation by a$2\times10^{20}{\rm\,W\,cm^{-2}}$ intensity, $60{\rm\,fs}$ duration, circularlypolarized laser pulse, the electrons in the collisional simulation rapidlyreach a well-thermalized distribution with ${\sim}3.5{\rm\,keV}$ temperature,while in the collisionless simulation the absorption is several orders ofmagnitude weaker. Circular polarization inhibits the generation of suprathermalelectrons, while ensuring efficient bulk heating through inversebremsstrahlung, a mechanism usually overlooked at relativistic laser intensity.An additional simulation, taking account of both collisional and fieldionization, yields similar results: the bulk electrons are heated to${\sim}2.5{\rm\,keV}$, but with a somewhat lower degree of thermalization thanin the pre-set, fixed-ionization case. The collisional absorption mechanism isfound to be robust against variations in the laser parameters. At fixed laserpulse energy, increasing the pulse duration rather than the intensity leads toa higher electron temperature.

Fast collisional electron heating and relaxation in thin foils driven by a circularly polarized ultraintense short-pulse laser