  The extreme ultraviolet plasma emission from liquid microsized argon droplets
exposed to intense near-infrared laser pulses has been investigated. Emission
from the warm dense matter targets is recorded in a spectral range in between
16 and 30 nm at laser intensities of 10^14 W/cm^2. Above the emission
threshold, soft x-ray radiation exponentially increases with the pulse energy
whereby a strong dependence of the yields on the pulse duration is observed,
which points at an effective electron collisional heating of the microplasma by
inverse bremsstrahlung. Accompanying hydrodynamic simulations reveal the
temporal and spatial development of the microplasma conditions. The good
agreement in between the measured and calculated emission spectra as well as
the extracted electron temperatures confirm that hydrodynamic simulations can
be applied in the analysis of strongly excited droplets.
