Regime for a self-ionizing Raman laser amplifier

Backward Raman amplification and compression at high power might occur if a long pumping laser pulse is passed through a plasma to interact resonantly with a counter-propagating short seed pulse [V. M. Malkin , Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 4448-4451 (1999)]. One critical issue, however, is that the pump may be unacceptably depleted due to spontaneous Raman backscatter from intrinsic fluctuations in the amplifying plasma medium prior to its useful interaction with the seed. Premature backscatter may be avoided, however, by employing a gaseous medium with pump intensities too low to ionize the medium and using the intense seed to produce the plasma by rapid photoionization as it is being amplified [V. M. Malkin , Phys. Plasmas 8, 4698-4699 (2001)]. In addition to allowing that only rather low power pumps be used, photoionization introduces a damping of the short pulse which must be overcome by the Raman growth rate for net amplification to occur. The parameter space of gas densities, laser wavelengths, and laser intensities is surveyed to identify favorable regimes for this effect. Output laser intensities of 2x10(17) W/cm(2) for 0.5 mum radiation are found to be feasible for such a scheme using a pump of 1x10(13) W/cm(2) and an initial seed of 5x10(14) W/cm(2) over an amplification length of 5.6 cm in hydrogen gas. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.