Anomalous hot electron generation from two-plasmon decay instability driven by broadband laser pulses with intensity modulations

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the hot electrons generated from two-plasmon decay (TPD) instability driven by laser pulses with intensity modulated by a frequency Δω m using theoretical and numerical approaches. Our primary focus lies on scenarios where Δω m is on the same order of the TPD growth rate γ 0 ( Δ ω m ∼ γ 0 ), corresponding to moderate laser frequency bandwidths for TPD mitigation. With Δω m conveniently modeled by a basic two-color scheme of the laser wave fields in fully-kinetic particle-in-cell simulations, we demonstrate that the energies of TPD modes and hot electrons exhibit intermittent evolution at the frequency Δω m , particularly when Δ ω m ∼ γ 0 . With the dynamic TPD behavior, the overall ratio of hot electron energy to the incident laser energy, f hot , changes significantly with Δω m . While f hot drops notably with increasing Δω m at large Δω m limit as expected, it goes anomalously beyond the hot electron energy ratio for a single-frequency incident laser pulse with the same average intensity when Δω m falls below a specific threshold frequency Δω c . This anomaly arises from the pronounced sensitivity of f hot to variations in laser intensity. We find this threshold frequency Δω c primarily depends on γ 0 and the collisional damping rate of plasma waves, with relatively lower sensitivity to the density scale length. We develop a scaling model characterizing the relation of Δω c and laser plasma conditions, enabling the potential extention of our findings to more complex and realistic scenarios.