Stimulated Brillouin Amplification with Flying Focus
Abstract
Material damage thresholds pose a fundamental limit to chirped pulse amplification (CPA) in high-power laser systems. Plasma-based amplification via stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) offers a damage-free alternative, yet its effectiveness has been hindered by instabilities that constrain interaction length. In this study, we report the first experimental demonstration of SBS amplification driven by a flying focus in a 3-mm plasma channel. The flying focus is generated using chromatic aberration from spherical lenses, with its velocity precisely measured by an interferometric ionization method achieving 6.6 fs timing resolution. At a focus velocity near -c, SBS amplification is realized at pump and seed intensities more than two orders of magnitude lower than in conventional setups, yielding a conversion efficiency of 14.5%. These results validate flying focus as a powerful tool for extending interaction lengths and enabling efficient plasma-based laser amplification at reduced intensities.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.04121,
title = {Stimulated Brillouin Amplification with Flying Focus},
author = {Zhaohui Wu and Xiaoming Zeng and Zhaoli Li and Xiaodong Wang and Xiao Wang and Jie Mu and Yanlei Zuo and Kainan Zhou and Hao Peng and C. Riconda and S. Weber},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.04121},
year = {2025}
}