Amplification of short laser pulses by Raman backscattering in capillary plasmas

Abstract

Short laser pulses can be significantly amplified in the process of Raman backscattering in plasma inside an oversized dielectric capillary. A dielectric capillary allows obtaining high intensities of the output radiation by sustaining efficient amplification at large distances compared to the diffraction length. The efficiency of the interaction between the pump wave and the amplified pulse is shown not to be critically sensitive to the transverse structure of the wave fields. For a quasi-single-mode initial seed pulse and a low pump intensity, the amplified pulse tends to preserve its transverse structure due to nonlinear competition of the capillary eigen-modes. At a high power of the pump wave, multimode amplification always takes place but the growth of the front peak of the pulse still follows the one-dimensional model. The Raman backscattering instability of the pump wave resulting in the noise amplification can be suppressed in detuned interaction by chirping the pump wave or arranging an inhomogeneous plasma density profile along the trace of amplification. The efficiency of the desired pulse amplification does not significantly depend on detuning in the case of a smooth detuning profile. Density inhomogeneities are shown to exert less influence on the amplification within a capillary than in the one-dimensional problem. Parameters of a future experiment on the Raman amplification of a short laser pulse inside a capillary are proposed.