How much laser power can propagate through fusion plasma?

Abstract

Propagation of intense laser beams is crucial for inertial confinement fusion, which requires precise beam control to achieve the compression and heating necessary to ignite the fusion reaction. The National Ignition Facility (NIF), where fusion will be attempted, is now under construction. Control of intense beam propagation may be ruined by laser beam self-focusing. We have identified the maximum laser beam power that can propagate through fusion plasma without significant self-focusing and have found excellent agreement with recent experimental data, and suggest a way to increase that maximum by appropriate choice of plasma composition with implication for NIF designs. Our theory also leads to the prediction of anti-correlation between beam spray and backscatter and suggests the indirect control of backscatter through manipulation of plasma ionization state or acoustic damping.

15 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion

References in corpus (1)

• Instability Versus Equilibrium Propagation of Laser Beam in Plasma

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Beyond leading order logarithmic scaling in the catastrophic self-focusing (collapse) of a laser beam in Kerr media
• Diffraction controlled backscattering threshold and application to Raman gap
• Nonlinear combining of laser beams
• Langmuir wave filamentation in the kinetic regime. I. Filamentation instability of Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal modes in multidimensional Vlasov simulations
• Nonlinear combining of multiple laser beams in Kerr medium
• Beyond the random phase approximation: Stimulated Brillouin backscatter for finite laser coherence times