Measurement of extremely new phenomena during the interaction of laser pulses with terawatt and higher power and picoseconds with plasmas arrived at drastically different anomalies in contrast to the usual observations if the laser pulses were very clean with a contrast ratio higher than 108. This was guaranteed by the suppression of prepulses during less than dozens of ps before the arrival of the main pulse resulting in the suppression of relativistic self-focusing. This anomaly was confirmed in many experimental details, and explained and numerically reproduced as a nonlinear force acceleration of skin layers generating quasi-neutral plasma blocks with ion current densities above 1011 A/cm2. This may support the requirement to produce a fast ignition deuterium tritium fusion at densities not much higher than the solid state by a single shot PW-ps laser pulse. With the aim to achieve separately studied ignition conditions, we are studying numerically how the necessary nonlinear force accelerated plasma blocks may reach the highest possible thickness by using optimized dielectric properties of the irradiated plasma. The use of double Rayleigh initial density profiles results in many wavelength thick low reflectivity directed plasma blocks of modest temperatures. Results of computations with the genuine two-fluid model are presented.

The effect of medium temperature upon characteristic of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) and SBS optical limiting is investigated. The physical mechanism behind is analyzed theoretically and experimentally verified in Continuum's Nd: YAG Q-switched laser system using FC-72 as the SBS medium. The temperature affects the electrostrictive coefficient, refractive index, density and acoustic velocity of the medium weakly. In contrast, the kinematic viscosity, which is inversely proportional to the temperature, is related to gain coefficient and phonon lifetime and thus greatly affects the SBS characteristics. Therefore, in the low temperature, the kinematic viscosity is usually high, which can lead to a small gain coefficient and a short phonon lifetime. Therefore, the SBS characteristic can be changed by controlling the temperature to a great extent.

In order to improve the optical limiting performance based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), a combination of SBS and carbon nanotube/HT-270 suspension for optical limiting is proposed in this paper. The dependence of output energy of optical limiting based on this hybrid approach on the pump energy is numerically simulated, and validated in Continuum's Nd: YAG seed-injected laser. The results indicate that the output energy based on this hybrid approach shows much better performance compared with that based on single SBS. In this approach, the SBS threshold can be controlled by adjusting the gain coefficient of medium and focal length of the lens, and the threshold of suspension can be controlled by altering the concentration and focal length of the lens, therefore, this hybrid approach to realize optical limiting has great potential in practical application.

Ion projectile stopping at velocity smaller than target electron thermal velocity in a strong magnetic field is investigated within a novel diffusion formulation, based on Green-Kubo integrands evaluated in magnetized one component plasma models, respectively, framed on target ions and electron. Analytic expressions are reported for slowing down orthogonal and parallel to an arbitrary large magnetic field, which are free from the usual uncertainties plaguing the standard perturbative derivations.

This paper presents the laser beam filamentation at ultra relativistic laser powers, when the paraxial restriction on the beam is relaxed during the filamentation process. On account of laser beam intensity gradient and background density gradients in filamentary regions, the electron plasma wave (EPW) at pump wave frequency is generated. This EPW is found to be highly localized because of the laser beam filaments. The interaction of the incident laser beam with the EPW leads to the second harmonic generation. The second harmonic spectrum has also been studied in detail, and its correlation with the filamentation of the laser beam has been established. Starting almost with a monochromatic component of laser beam propagation, the second harmonic spectrum becomes more complicated, and broadened when the laser beam propagates further, and filamentation takes place. For the typical laser beam and plasma parameters: laser beam with wave length of 1064 nm, power flux of 1018 W/cm2, and plasma with temperature 1 KeV, we found that the conversion efficiency equals about (E2/E0) = 8 × 10−3, and the spectrum is quite broad, which depends upon the laser beam propagation distance. The results (specifically, the second harmonic spectral feature) presented here may be used for the diagnostics of laser produced plasmas.

Repeated plasma outbursts were recognized at our analyzing currents of the fast carbon and fluorine ions produced with the sub-nanosecond PALS laser beam (λ0 = 1.315 µm, τL = ≈350 ps, Imax ≈ 6 × 1015 W/cm2) focused onto polytetrafluoroethylene and polyethylene targets. This study deals with a repetitive occurrence of doublets of C6+-C5+ and F9+-F8+ ion peaks in the time-of-flight (TOF) spectra, whose TOF can be related to the same accelerating voltage: . The repeated occurrence of ion outbursts containing fully ionized ions can be characterized by a set of discrete voltages Ui, where the subscript i ∈ (1, N) labels the outbursts of ions from the fastest one (i = 1) up to the slowest and in the TOF spectrum yet distinguishable outburst (i = N). These discrete values could indicate plasma pulsations followed by repetitive outbursts of ions. The ions expand with a velocity up to ≈9 × 108 cm/s. The corresponding values of the accelerating voltage of ≈800 kv, and the temperature of ≈1.1 keV were determined by revealing partial ion currents based on the shifted Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution. Characteristics of fast ion outbursts depend on the focus position with respect to the target surface.

The beam combination method using stimulated Brillouin scattering phase conjugate mirrors (SBS-PCMs) is a promising technique for a high energy and high power laser output operating with a high repetition rate. The two-beam combined system was previously demonstrated with an amplitude dividing method. A four-beam combined laser system with amplitude dividing method is demonstrated in this work, and the phase stabilization experiment of this system is performed using the self phase control and the long-term stabilization technique. The phase differences between the SBS waves are stabilized with λ/30 and the fluctuation of the four-beam combined output energy is 6.16% during 2000 shots (200 s).

Short pulse laser plasma interaction experiments using diffraction limited beams provide an excellent platform to investigate the fundamental physics of stimulated Raman scattering. Detailed understanding of these laser plasma instabilities impacts the current inertial confinement fusion ignition designs and could potentially impact fast ignition when higher energy lasers are used with longer pulse durations (>1 kJ and >1 ps). Using short laser pulses, experiments can be modeled over the entire interaction time of the laser using particle-in-cell codes to validate our understanding quantitatively. Experiments have been conducted at the Trident laser facility and the Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation des Lasers Intenses (LULI) to investigate stimulated Raman scattering near the threshold of the instability using 527 nm and 1059 nm laser light, respectively, with 1.5–3.0 ps pulses. In both experiments, the interaction beam was focused into pre-ionized helium gas-jet plasma. Measurements of the reflectivity as a function of intensity and kλD were completed at the Trident laser facility, where k is the electron plasma wave number and λD is the plasma Debye length. At LULI, a 300 fs Thomson scattering probe is used to directly measure the density fluctuations of the driven electron plasma and ion acoustic waves. Work is currently underway comparing the results of the experiments with simulations using the VPIC particle-in-cell code. Details of the experimental results are presented in this manuscript.