Growth and saturation of convective modes of the two-plasmon decay instability in inertial confinement fusion

Phys Rev Lett. 2009 Oct 23;103(17):175002. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.175002. Epub 2009 Oct 20.

Abstract

Particle-in-cell (PIC) and fluid simulations of two-plasmon decay (TPD) instability under conditions relevant to inertial confinement fusion show the importance of convective modes. Growing at the lower density region, the convective modes can cause pump depletion and are energetically dominant in the nonlinear stage. The PIC simulations show that TPD saturates due to ion density fluctuations, which can turn off TPD by raising the instability threshold through mode coupling.