Control of laser-plasma instabilities by non-collinear polychromatic light

Abstract

Normal broadband lasers with collinear polychromatic components have immense potential for mitigating laser plasma instabilities (LPIs). However, the projection complexity of collinear polychromatic light (CPL) is a significant challenge owing to the demand for a large bandwidth and beamlet number. Here, we propose a theoretical LPI model and optical design for non-collinear polychromatic light (NCPL), which has a small angle ∼4∘ and large frequency difference ∼1% between the double-color beamlets. LPI models of the NCPL demonstrate a decoupling threshold for the shared daughter waves under a multibeam configuration. Compared with the CPL, the wavevector couplings of LPIs are further reduced by the introduced angle. Therefore, both the growth rate and saturation level of LPIs are greatly mitigated by using the NCPL. The two- and three-dimensional simulation results indicate that the NCPL reduces the absolute and convective decoupling thresholds of the CPL and is sufficient to effectively mitigate the reflectivity, hot-electron generation, and intensity of cross-beam energy transfer. An optical design for the efficient generation of ultraviolet NCPL has been presented based on the unsaturated optical parametric amplification and non-collinear sum-frequency generation.