title: Detuned raman amplification of short laser pulses in plasma
abstract: The recently proposed scheme of so-called "fast compression" of laser pulses in plasma can increase peak laser intensities by 10(5) [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 4448 (1999)]. The compression mechanism is the transient stimulated Raman backscattering, which outruns the fastest filamentation instabilities of the pumped pulse even at highly overcritical powers. This Letter proposes a novel nonlinear filtering effect that suppresses premature backscattering of the pump in a noisy plasma layer, while the desired amplification of a sufficiently intense seed persists with a high efficiency. The effect is of basic interest and also makes it robust to noise the simplest technologically fast compression scheme.
authors.affiliation: Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.
authors.initials: VM
authors.lastname: Malkin
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Shvets
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Fisch