Phys.org January 31, 2023 High power lasers have become useful scientific tools, but their large size is determined by their low damage-threshold optical media. A more robust and compact medium for amplifying and manipulating intense laser pulses is plasma. An international team of researchers (UK, Germany, Portugal) has demonstrated, experimentally and through simulations, that few-millijoule, ultra-short seed pulses interacting with 3.5-J counter-propagating pump pulses in plasma, stimulate back-scattering of nearly 100 mJ pump energy with high intrinsic efficiency, when detuned from Raman resonance. This is due to scattering off a plasma Bragg grating formed by ballistically evolving ions. Electrons are […]