Instability Versus Equilibrium Propagation of Laser Beam in Plasma

Abstract

We obtain, for the first time, an analytic theory of the forward stimulated Brillouin scattering instability of a spatially and temporally incoherent laser beam, that controls the transition between statistical equilibrium and non-equilibrium (unstable) self-focusing regimes of beam propagation. The stability boundary may be used as a comprehensive guide for inertial confinement fusion designs. Well into the stable regime, an analytic expression for the angular diffusion coefficient is obtained, which provides an essential correction to a geometric optic approximation for beam propagation.

4 pages,6 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (1)

• Radiative transport limit for the random Schrödinger equation

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