Recent laser-plasma interaction studies at LLNL

Recent analysis and modeling of Nova experiments which address our understanding of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) will be presented. Forward and backward SBS levels have been investigated with SSD of varying bandwidth and with polarization smoothing using an f/8 focusing geometry to emulate NIF conditions. The interpretation of the experiments is aided using F3D, a fluid code which includes modeling of SBS and SRS; a parallel version of F3D is being developed which will allow the modeling of a plasma approaching the size of an entire NIF laser beam. Cryogenic targets have recently been employed to investigate the dependence of SRS saturation levels on ion wave damping via the Langmuir decay instability