Kinetic Effects on the Ion Sound Waves Generated by Stimulated Brillouin Scattering of a Spatially Smoothed Laser Beam

Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) can drive ion sound waves to amplitudes such that steepening and particle kinetic effects occur. Such phenomena have been studied recently in spatial volumes corresponding to a single laser speckle, in two [Cohen, B. I. et al. Phys. Plasmas 4, 956 (1997)], and three spatial dimensions [Vu, H. X., Phys. Plasmas 4, 1841 (1997)]. We analyze the results of 2D kinetic simulations modeling the evolution of SBS in the case of a spatially smoothed laser beam interacting with a plasma containing many speckles. For this purpose, we have coupled a 2D particle-in-cell code to a 2D non-paraxial electromagnetic wave solver. The generation of a fast ion population is observed to initially take place in the most intense hot spots, resulting in a decrease of the amplitude of the ion sound wave amplitude generated by SBS in these hot spots. SBS activity is consequently reduced in the most intense laser speckles, so that the overall back scattering SBS reflectivity drops considerably below the values expected from models that do not account for particle kinetics and/or nonlinear hydrodynamics.