Statistics of the hottest spot of speckle patterns generated by smoothing techniques

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the statistical distribution of the maximal hot spots of speckle patterns such as those generated by optical smoothing methods designed for inertial confinement fusion. It is proved that the maximal intensity at the first order is proportional to the logarithm of the ratio of the pulse volume over the mean hot spot volume. Nevertheless the complete description of the maximal intensity exhibits a quite important variance. Different ways for reducing either the maximal fluence or the maximal intensity are investigated, which are based upon time incoherence or polarization smoothing.