Experimental approach to interaction physics challenges of the shock ignition scheme using short pulse lasers

An experimental program was designed to study the most important issues of laser-plasma interaction physics in the context of the shock ignition scheme. In the new experiments presented in this Letter, a combination of kilojoule and short laser pulses was used to study the laser-plasma coupling at high laser intensities for a large range of electron densities and plasma profiles. We find that the backscatter is dominated by stimulated Brillouin scattering with stimulated Raman scattering staying at a limited level. This is in agreement with past experiments using long pulses but laser intensities limited to 2×10(15)  W/cm2, or short pulses with intensities up to 5×10(16)  W/cm2 as well as with 2D particle-in-cell simulations.