Leaky Channel Stabilization of Intense Laser Pulses in Tenuous Plasmas

Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 4440 (1995)https://ireap.umd.edu/10.1103/PhysRevLett.74.44401995Journal ArticlePlasma, Accelerator, and Nuclear Physics

The propagation of intense laser pulses in underdense plasmas is known to be severely affected by instabilities of the Raman type. A class of these instabilities, whose perturbations correspond to higher order radial modes of propagation, can be stabilized when the laser pulse is propagated in a preformed density channel. The plasma channel should be of the type recently demonstrated to guide laser light [C. G. Durfee III and H. M. Milchberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 2409 (1993)]. That is, it should support only the lowest mode of propagation while allowing higher order modes to leak away.