Manipulating ultraintense laser pulses in plasmas

An efficient way for manipulating ultraintense laser pulses in plasmas using resonant three-wave interactions is proposed. Poor quality ultraintense laser pulses can be efficiently transformed into high quality focused laser pulses, while the entropy is taken up by resonant plasma waves. This can be accomplished within plasma layers thin enough that parasitic scatterings and instabilities of laser pulses do not have enough time to develop. Combined with laser pulse compression in plasmas, this scheme, using, for example, the lasers that power the National Ignition Facility (see, for instance, the NIF project website: http://www.llnl.gov/nif/project), is potentially capable of producing vacuum breakdown intensities.