Laser beam propagation through inertial confinement fusion hohlraum plasmas

A study of the laser-plasma interaction processes have been performed in plasmas that are created to emulate the plasma conditions in indirect drive inertial confinement fusion targets. The plasma emulator is produced in a gas-filled hohlraum; a blue 351-nm laser beam propagates along the axis of the hohlraum interacting with a high-temperature (Te= 3.5 keV), dense (ne= 5 x 10(20) cm(-3)), long-scale length (L - 2 mm ) plasma. Experiments at these conditions have demonstrated that the interaction beam produces less than 1% total backscatter resulting in transmission greater than 90% for laser intensities less than I < 2 x 1015 W cm(-2). The bulk plasma conditions have been independently characterized using Thomson scattering where the peak electron temperatures are shown to scale with the hohlraum heater beam energy in the range from 2 keV to 3.5 keV. This feature has allowed us to determine the thresholds for both backscattering and filamentation instabilities; the former measured with absolutely calibrated full aperture backscatter and near backscatter diagnostics and the latter with a transmitted beam diagnostics. Comparing the experimental results with detailed gain calculations for the onset of significant laser scattering processes shows a stimulated Brillouin scattering threshold (R= 10%) for a linear gain of 15; these high temperature, low density experiments produce plasma conditions comparable to those along the outer beams in ignition hohlraum designs. By increasing the gas fill density (ne= 1021 cm(-3)) in these targets, the inner beam ignition hohlraum conditions are accessed. In this case, stimulated Raman scattering dominates the backscattering processes and we show that scattering is small for gains less than 20 which can be achieved through proper choice of the laser beam intensity. (C) 2007 American Institute of Physics.