Superradiant Pulse Compression Using Free-carrier Plasma
Authors: G. Shvets, N.J. Fisch, A. Pukhov and J. Meyer-ter-Vehn
Date of PPPL Report: July 2000
To be presented at: the IEEE Lasers and Elctro-optics Society 2000, Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, 13-16 November 2000. To be published in conference proceedings.
Free-carrier plasma can be used as an effective nonlinear medium for pulse compression. In the backward Raman amplifier geometry, the lower-frequency seed can extract most of the long pump energy through the mechanism of nonlinear superradiance. Filamentation is avoided due to strong dependence of the Raman instability growth rate on the wavenumber.