Shock formation in flowing plasmas by temporally and spatially smoothed laser beams
Résumé
The cumulative impact of multiple laser speckles on the supersonic plasma flow across optically smoothed laser beams is investigated. The bending of the laser beams caused by ponderomotive laser-plasma coupling, together with flow, lead to plasma response by momentum conservation that results in a deceleration of the flow. Once the flow velocity decreases to a subsonic level, the action of the laser beams can generate a shock within the plasma. This scenario has been predicted theoretically and confirmed by hydrodynamic simulations. The conditions of shock generation are given in terms of the ponderomotive pressure, speckle size and the flow velocity. The nonlinear properties of the shocks are analyzed using Rankine-Hugoniot relations. According to linear theory, temporally smoothed beams exhibit a higher threshold for shock generation. Numerical simulations with beams that are smoothed by spectral dispersion compare well with the linear theory results, diverging from those produced by beams with only a random phase plates in the nonlinear regime. The conditions necessary for shock generation and their effects on the laser plasma coupling in the inertial confinement fusion experiments are also discussed.
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