Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph)

Abstract: Normal broadband lasers with collinear polychromatic components have immense potential for mitigating laser plasma instabilities (LPIs). However, the projection complexity of collinear polychromatic light (CPL) is a significant challenge owing to the demand for a large bandwidth and beamlet number. Here, we propose a driver scheme for non-collinear polychromatic light (NCPL) with a small angle $\sim4^\circ$ between the double-color beamlets. The frequency difference between the beamlets of each NCPL is 1\%, and the beamlet colors of any two adjacent flanges are different. LPI models of the NCPL in both homogeneous and inhomogeneous plasmas have been developed, which lead to a decoupling threshold for the shared daughter waves under a multibeam configuration. Compared with the CPL, both the growth rate and saturation level of LPIs are greatly reduced by using the NCPL. The two- and three-dimensional simulation results indicate that the NCPL reduces the absolute and convective decoupling thresholds of the CPL and is sufficient to effectively mitigate the reflectivity, hot-electron generation, and intensity of cross-beam energy transfer. A novel design for the efficient generation of ultraviolet NCPL has been presented based on non-collinear sum-frequency generation. The proposed NCPL driver with a compact configuration can significantly enhance the beam-target coupling efficiency, which paves the way towards the realization of robust fusion ignition.