Resonant four-photon scattering of collinear laser pulses in plasma

Exact four-photon resonance of collinear planar laser pulses is known to be prohibited by the classical dispersion law of electromagnetic waves in plasma. We show here that the renormalization produced by an arbitrarily small relativistic electron nonlinearity removes this prohibition. The laser frequency shifts in collinear resonant four-photon scattering increase with laser intensities. For laser pulses of frequencies much greater than the electron plasma frequency, the shifts can also be much greater than the plasma frequency and even nearly double the input laser frequency at still small relativistic electron nonlinearities. This may enable broad range tunable lasers of very high frequencies and powers. Since the four-photon scattering does not rely on the Langmuir wave, which is very sensitive to plasma homogeneity, such lasers would also be able to operate at much larger plasma inhomogeneities than lasers based on stimulated Raman scattering in plasma.

Figure 1

Opposite transitions of the input photons 1 and 2 into the output photons 3 and 4, respectively, coupled via a virtual photon exchange.

Figure 2

The resonant manifold Eq. (44) for down-shifting regimes $q_1-q_3\gg k_e$.

Figure 3

The resonant manifold Eq. (42) for up-shifting regimes $q_3-q_1\gg k_e$.