Velocities of speckles in a smoothed laser beam propagating in a plasma

François Walraet (1) , Guy Bonnaud (1) , Gilles Riazuelo (1)

1 DPTA - Département de Physique Théorique et Appliquée

By means of three-dimensional simulations, the paraxial propagation of a laser beam in a nonlinear plasma modeled by ion-acoustic waves is examined. The beam speckles are smoothed by a one-dimensional transverse spectral dispersion technique. In the case of weak smoothing and when the incident speckle velocity is subsonic, the propagation in the plasma is found to exhibit an asymptotic speckle velocity and to enhance filamentation. With contrary conditions, it is found to reduce simply the speckle velocity.

Domains: Plasma Physics [physics.plasm-ph]

François Walraet, Guy Bonnaud, Gilles Riazuelo. Velocities of speckles in a smoothed laser beam propagating in a plasma. Physics of Plasmas, 2001, 8, pp.4717 - 4720. ⟨10.1063/1.1405128⟩. ⟨cea-01709026⟩