Suprathermal Electrons from the Anti-Stokes Langmuir Decay Instability Cascade

Abstract

The study of parametric instabilities has played a crucial role in understanding energy transfer to plasma and, with that, the development of key applications such as inertial confinement fusion. When the densities are between $0.108n_c\lesssim n_e\lesssim 0.138n_c$ and the electron temperature is $T_e=$2.5 keV, anomalous hot electrons with kinetic energies above 100 keV are generated. Here, a new electron acceleration mechanism - the anti-Stokes Langmuir decay instability cascade of forward stimulated Raman scattering - is investigated. This mechanism not only explains anomalous energetic electron generation in indirectly driven inertial confinement fusion experiments (and, with that, future mitigation strategies for experiments on the National Ignition Facility), it also provides a new way of accelerating electrons to higher energy for applications such as novel X-ray sources.