  The expansion of laser-irradiated clusters or nanodroplets depends strongly
on the amount of energy delivered to the electrons and can be controlled by
using appropriately shaped laser pulses. In this paper, a self-consistent
kinetic model is used to analyze the transition from quasineutral,
hydrodinamic-like expansion regimes to the Coulomb explosion (CE) regime when
increasing the ratio between the thermal energy of the electrons and the
electrostatic energy stored in the cluster. It is shown that a suitable
double-pump irradiation scheme can produce hybrid expansion regimes, wherein a
slow hydrodynamic expansion is followed by a fast CE, leading to ion overtaking
and producing multiple ion flows expanding with different velocities. This can
be exploited to obtain intracluster fusion reactions in both homonuclear
deuterium clusters and heteronuclear deuterium-tritium clusters, as also proved
by three-dimensional molecular-dynamics simulations.
